10:00 am, June 28, 2020
Thunderbolt in the hushed world of antiques. Renowned Mediterranean archeology expert Christophe Kunicki and her art dealer husband were indicted Friday evening in Paris by Judge Jean-Michel Gentil for “swindles in organized gangs, criminal association, laundering in organized gangs and forgery and use of forgery”. Asked, their lawyer Emmanuel Marsigny declined to speak. Three other people who had also been arrested, including the president of the auction house Pierre Bergé & Associés and a former curator of the Louvre, were not presented to the magistrate.
This hands-on operation could take on another scale with the creation of a consortium of international investigators to trace the course of the hundreds of works identified as suspect and find suppliers and intermediaries. The names of the Aboutaam brothers, famous Lebanese-Swiss art dealers, located in Geneva but also in New York, appear in the file, among others. “Some pieces have been around the world, warns a source familiar with the matter. Others are stored in free ports in Switzerland or in museums in New York or at Louvre Abou Dhabi. “The museum is in possession of three” contentious “works.
Were the looted works knowingly sold by the auction house?
Since the summer of 2018, the police from the Central Office to Combat Trafficking in Cultural Property have targeted several hundred works that have been looted or exported illegally over the past ten years from Egypt, Libya, Yemen or Syria for millions of euros. “At this stage, the offense of financing terrorism by purchasing parts from terrorist groups has not been demonstrated,” said a source familiar with the matter.
The UN prohibits any transnational trade from these unstable states if there is a presumption of illegal exit of the objects. “These pieces, if it is shown that they were indeed exported clandestinely, specifies the specialized lawyer Elisabeth Fortis, should never have been sold by a renowned house, which gave them a certificate of virginity and reassured the buyers. ”
Member of the French Union of Professional Experts in Works of Art (SFEP) and of the European Chamber of Art Experts (CEEA), Christophe Kunicki was, until November 2019, the expert associated with the archaeological sales of the Maison Pierre Bergé & Associés. Failing to be able to buy Drouot in 2002, the billionaire, died in 2017, created his own auction house, notably with auctioneer Antoine Godeau, who has since become president of Pierre Bergé & Associés.
A judicial precedent in Egypt
The name of Christophe Kunicki and that of her husband already appeared in a case of object looted in Egypt in 2011: the sarcophagus of the priest Nedjemankh. After having passed through Dubai, Germany, then Paris, the work was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 2017 for 3.5 million euros by Christophe Kunicki. The centerpiece of an exhibition bearing his name, the sarcophagus was finally solemnly returned to Egypt in 2019 after an investigation established that it had been stolen in the year of the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak.
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