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Jean-Luc Martínez, former head of the famous Louvre Museum, was accused of alleged money laundering and complicity in an organized gang fraud in an antiquities trafficking case. The works in question involve the Louvre in Abu Dhabi and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Martínez was released, but remains under judicial control.
The former president of the Louvre Museum, today ambassador for International Cooperation in the Field of Heritage, a position granted by the French Ministry of Culture, was questioned and prosecuted for money laundering and complicity in fraud in an organized gang within the framework of an investigation antiquities traffic.
According to the newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné, investigators are seeking to know if Martinez ‘turned a blind eye’ to the false certificates of origin of five Egyptian antiquities, including a pink granite stele of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, acquired by the Louvre Abu Dabi (a branch of the Paris Museum) for €15.2 million.
The authorities are investigating the origin of the piece, acquired in 2016 and whose origin has been questioned by Professor Marc Gabolde, from the Paul-Valéry University of Montpellier. For Gabolde the perfect state of the stele is “unusual for a king whose buildings, except for his tomb, have been hammered down,” a conclusion highlighted in a 47-page investigation published in “Revue d’Egyptologie” in March. of 2020.
Gabolde trusts, as he points out in the newspaper Le Monde, that his colleagues at the Louvre have been victims of this scam and are not traffickers.
Jean-Luc Martinez, archaeologist and art historian, who directed the Louvre between 2013 and 2021, was arrested on Monday, May 23, at the headquarters of the Central Office for the Fight against Trafficking in Cultural Property (OCBC) and charged with preliminary charges. on the night of May 25. Although he was released he remains under judicial control.
Along with him, according to the Paris Prosecutor’s Office, two renowned French Egyptologists were arrested: the curator of the Museum’s Egyptian antiquities department, Vincent Rondot, and the Egyptologist Olivier Perdu, both released without charge on Tuesday night.
The origins of the investigation
In the investigation, several art dealers and experts are suspected of having produced false documents to invent the origins of stolen pieces in different Middle Eastern countries during the riots of the so-called Arab Spring.
In the article published this Thursday, May 26, by the newspaper Le Monde, it is stated that “in the eyes of the judges, a serious problem of provenance arises, allegedly manipulated by the expert in antiquities Christophe Kunicki and the merchant Roben Dib. The researchers They suspect that they produced false documents and invented origins to ‘launder’ hundreds of archaeological objects looted in different Middle Eastern countries.”
Precisely in the crosshairs of the police has been Kunicki, an archeology specialist and accused two years ago for the origin of the documentation of the pink granite stele of the pharaoh Tutankhamun.
Kunicki worked for the Bergé & Associés auction house – also affected by the investigations – and the authorities have been tracking him since in 2017 he sold the golden sarcophagus of Nedjemankh for 3.5 million euros to the Metropolitan Museum of New York.
The expert assured, at that time, that the work had legitimately left Egypt in 1971 but an investigation proved that it had been stolen during the uprising against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and was returned to the country in 2019 after a international investigation involving the United States, France, Egypt and Germany.
According to Le Monde, the sarcophagus was found to have passed through the hands of Roben Dib, a Hamburg merchant who fed Christophe Kunicki’s auctions.
And they are precisely, the newspaper reports, the same protagonists who proposed the granite stele, in 2016, to the acquisition commission of the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
With AP, EFE and local media
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