A court in Milan puts an end to the battle between the creditors of the former owners of the painting ‘Coffret, compotier et tasse’, considering that “the public interest prevails”
Treasury, in the end, always wins. The long judicial soap opera that has had as its protagonist the painting ‘Coffret, compotier et tasse’, made by Pablo Picasso in 1909 during his cubist period and valued at around 10 million euros, concluded this Tuesday with the sentence of a Milan court who assigned his property to the Italian Treasury, thus rejecting the arguments presented by the other two parties who claimed to be the owners of the work. It was the heir of an investor who had acquired 80% of the painting and the creditors of a bankrupt company whose owners were the former owners of the Picasso, who sold fraudulently as they were under embargo for their tax debts.
Following the decision of Judge Anna Calabi, collected this Wednesday by the Milanese newspaper ‘Corriere della Sera’, the canvas will return to Italy to probably be exhibited in a museum yet to be determined after almost a decade in the United States, where it was going to be auctioned in 2013. The operation was stopped thanks to the intervention of the Italian justice system, which has finally determined whose painting it is, appealing to the common good. In the conflict between private interests, represented by the buyer’s heir and by the company’s creditors, and those of the State, derived from the debt that the former owners had with the treasury, “the public interest prevails,” says the magistrate in the sentence. The other two affected parties will have to settle “through other assets.”
At the center of this intricate fight over the ownership of ‘Coffret, compotier et tasse’ is the Italian business couple Gabriella Amati and Angelo Maj, arrested in 2011 for embezzlement of public funds, among other economic crimes. This couple was the owner of the company in charge of collecting local taxes in Naples and other Italian municipalities between 2005 and 2009. When the contract expired, they continued to collect the fees from the citizens, then transferring the money to other accounts and refusing to deliver the funds. to local authorities. In the end, they accumulated more than 50 million euros in debt with public administrations and with various private creditors.
Debts
With the water up to their necks, Amati and Maj tried to obtain liquidity by selling the Picasso, which according to the Italian media they would have acquired to launder black money. The Italian investor Fiorenzo Consonni bought 80% of the ownership of the work from them, who was the one who took it to the United States and tried to sell it in an auction house in 2013, an operation that was blocked thanks to the intervention of the Italian Finance and Justice Guard. The businesswoman was already sentenced to 9 years in prison (her husband had died), so the painting and the rest of her assets could not be sold without first paying off the debts with the Treasury.
After Consonni’s death, his son has continued to fight for ownership of the Picasso in a legal battle that was also joined by the private creditors of this fraudulent marriage. To try to recover part of their money, they will now have to wait for Amati’s other assets to be liquidated, who is not known to have owned other works of art as valuable as ‘Coffret, compotier et tasse’.
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