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Showing posts with label Inanna Art Services. Geneva. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Inanna Art Services. Geneva. Show all posts

January 11, 2023

Wednesday, January 11, 2023 - ,,,,,,, No comments

Not surprisingly, and despite all of his protestations earlier, Ali Aboutaam has been convicted.


In a hearing that took less than an hour at the Geneva police court, Ali Aboutaam, the owner of the Geneva gallery Phoenix Ancient Art SA has been sentenced by the Swiss authorities.  Following on a complex and multi-year criminal and procedural investigation by officers and analysts with Switzerland's customs and anti-fraud divisions, working with the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office, the Swiss-based merchant has been found guilty of forgery of titles.  A misdemeanour under Swiss law on the transfer of cultural property, his admissions come with an 18-month suspended prison sentence, three years probation and requiring him to pay procedural costs totalling 450,000 francs or approximately €454,410.

The courts also confirmed the seizure of 42 artefacts, confiscated due to their illicit origin which will be devolved to the Federal Office of Culture.  Several dozen other antiquities will be returned to the countries of origin.

Aboutaam's conviction and sentencing comes in response to a conspiracy which proved that the art dealer, with the help of accomplices, produced false certificates of provenance in relation to ancient art objects in circulation. Aboutaam was also found guilty of having knowingly paid at least one accomplice, who sourced antiquities from illicit excavations in various countries of the Middle East.

A statement extracted from the Swiss indictment read: 
"Ali Aboutaam knew or must have assumed that they had been wrongfully acquired". 

This particular Swiss investigation dates back to 20 December 2016 when around 5:10 p.m., at around 17:10 hours, when arriving from France by car, a Swiss border patrol officer stopped a grey Land Rover vehicle, registration No. GE777994 registered to the company Phoenix Ancient Art SA, rue Verdaine 6 & 1204 Geneva at the Veyrier border checkpoint. The car had been driven by Ali Aboutaam's driver and was transporting then-Germany based antiquities dealer Roben Galel Dib as a passenger. 

The testimony of the two persons revealed that Dib was in possession of an antique oil lamp, which neither the driver, nor the purported owner of the lamp, were able to provide documentation for proving the object’s provenance to the officers’ satisfaction.  Dib told authorities he was coming to Switzerland to "meet a girl" and that he was carrying the lamp with him because he had just had an appointment on this subject in Paris to have it restored. The object was sequestered, and an inspection of the car revealed the presence of 3 receipts for the rental of two storage units at the company Flexbox Self Storage, route du Nant-d'Avril 40 in 1214 Vernier, in the name of a conservator in Chanoy. 

Both the driver and Roben Dib were released after questioning around 2:00 AM the following morning, while on or around that same time surveillance footage of the storage warehouse listed on the receipts found in the car captured Ali Aboutaam’s wife, Biljana Aboutaam, the family's chauffeur and a housekeeper participating “several movements of merchandise".  Predicated on the foregoing, Swiss Customs Administration developed a “strong suspicion” that the warehouse was being used to store illegally imported art and antiquities. 

As is publicly now known, Roben Dib is the business partner of Hamburg-based dealer of Egyptian art Serop Simonian.  Dib was arrested in Hamburg by German police on suspicion of art trafficking in August 2020 and released after only five weeks behind bars.  

Subject to a European Arrest Warrant, Dib was then rearrested in Paris, France on 22 March 2022 after traveling there to discuss charges related to dealing in illegally trafficked Egyptian antiquities with French authorities.  

Both Dib and Simonian have been tied to million dollar illicit antiquities which have made their way (illegally) into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and museum and private collections throughout the world on the basis of false provenance documentation, a subject which has been covered with frequency on this blog.  

In January 2016, a 3rd millennium BCE, alabaster plaque was displayed at the European art fair BRAFA after first passing through Port Franc, the free port of Geneva to Inanna Art Services, a subsidiary of Phoenix Ancient Art.  This artefact, according to a qualified Syrian archaeologist, likely came from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Mari.  This artefact was confiscated following an inspection operation, carried out by the Belgian Federal Public Service Economy (French: SPF Économie, Dutch: FOD Economie) along with a marble table in the context of a suspicion of illicit trafficking in antiquities. 


The plaque was first identified in the Aboutaam's Phoenix Ancient Art 2012 - Crystal IV catalogue, which listed the 39.5 cm 3rd millennium BCE plaque with an image of ritual worship as having a provenance of: 

"Ex Elie Bustros Collection, Beirut, 1950s-1960s"

implying that the artefact may have come from the Beirut dealer Elias (Elie) Bustros, purportedly active from at least the 1930s through by some records the 1980s.   

It should be noted that in addition to its Ottoman Empire laws an antiquities, the Syrian Republic's Antiquities Law, Decree No. 222, was enacted in 1963.  That law vested ownership of all antiquities in the State and prohibited the sale or transfer of antiquities without governmental approval. 

This is not, however, the only incidence where "Ex-Elie Bustros Collection" has been used in connection with an artefact handled by Phoenix Ancient Art.


Provenance:
Elias Bustros, Beruit 1950’s-1983;
By descent, 1983-1986?;
(Gawain McKinley, England, on behalf of Selim Dere and Sleiman Aboutaam, 1986)

Selim Dere is the owner of a New York antiquities gallery, Fortuna Fine Arts where Manhattan authorities executed a seizure warrant in June 2018. Erdal Dere (the son of Aysel Dere and Selim Dere), was indicted in the US indicted in relation to a conspiracy to defraud buyers and brokers in the antiquities market with the use of false provenance documentation. 

The Belgian identifications resulted in a separate four-year investigation overseen by the Belgian federal prosecutor's office into the activities of the Aboutaam brothers, who opened a branch of Phoenix Ancient Art in the city of Brussel's Sablon in 2017.  This branch was subject to police raids in 2019 ordered by Judge Michael Claise. 

By June 2021, a Lebanese intermediary of Phoenix Ancient Art had already been condemned by the Geneva public prosecutor for having imported archaeological objects looted in the Middle East.  This individual was identified as having travelled to Geneva four or five times a year, for four years, to deliver ancient objects to Ali Aboutaam. Arrested in Romania, he was extradited at the request of the Geneva public prosecutor's office.

That same year, in November 2021, Ali Aboutaam was handed a 1.6 million francs fine via Swiss customs, including the costs of the proceedings. The tax authorities came after the dealer in this instance for having imported 37 million francs worth of antiquities into Switzerland between 2010 and 2017 without paying the applicable VAT. 

Which brings us back to the present, the Swiss indictment, accepted by Ali Aboutaam within the framework of a simplified procedure, acknowledges the following, verbatim:

"Ali Aboutaam, in his capacity as administrator of Phoenix Ancient Art SA, has asked art experts, or has asked employees of Phoenix Ancient Art SA to obtain from art experts: produce and/or sign false invoices; and/or produce or cause others to produce documents indicating source that are contrary to reality, sometimes contained directly in invoices; and/or provide untrue source indications for use by others."

In another section of the indictment, Aboutaam agrees that the falsification  of provenance documentation was done to launder the artworks, giving them: 

"a pedigree aimed at dispelling suspicion of illicit provenance and/or to facilitate their customs transfer with a view to their sale on the art market through Phoenix Ancient Art SA, Tanis Antiquities LTB and Inanna Art Services SA, i.e. companies of which Ali Aboutaam has Control."

The mention of Tanis is significant.  It helps conceptualise the range of years where this shell company has been linked to questionable transactions and laundered antiquities.  In 13 December 2003 Hicham Aboutaam, Ali's brother, was arrested in the United States and charged with smuggling the silver ceremonial drinking vessel known as a rhyton into the United States from Iran and falsely claiming that it came from Syria.  That 2003 government complaint identified the gallery’s affiliate office in New York as "the Bloomfield Collection" and informed that the invoice for the artefact, declaring Syria as country of origin was issued by Tanis Antiquities, Ltd.  

Tanis Antiquities, Ltd comes up again very recently in the ongoing important French investigation involving materials sold to the Louvre Abu Dhabi.  As reported by the French newspaper Liberation, French investigators discovered that Jean-François Charnier's sister, Marie-Christine Charnier, had received money from the Aboutaam family via an account opened in a Moroccan bank, paid from the offshore structure controlled by the merchants, again, Tanis Antiquities Ltd., based in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.  

The legal representative for Tanis Antiquities Ltd is, a Canadian citizen, of Lebanese origin, resident of Geneva, Ali Aboutaam.

I will close this article by mentioning that this is not the first occasion where the Aboutaam family, or Ali personally, has had run ins with legal authorities for their involvement  in the circulation of suspect artefacts originating from varying jurisdictions regarding trafficked objects from the Middle East.  In April 2004 Ali Aboutaam was tried in absentia in an Egyptian court and pronounced guilty and sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison in a long-running trafficking ring that had smuggled Egyptian artefacts through Switzerland to Western dealers and galleries.  That investigation resulted in the convictions of 25 defendants, including several high-ranking Egyptian police and government officials and nine foreigners. 

March 24, 2017

Friday, March 24, 2017 - ,,,,,,,, No comments

Repatriation: Roman sarcophagus held at Swiss Freeport finally clears last hurdle for its return to Turkey

Image taken September 23, 2015
by the Office of the Attorney General of the Canton of Geneva - Image Credit: AFP
In December 2010, Swiss Federal Customs Administration authorities, acting under new customs legislation to combat trafficking in works of art, requested access to the inventory of Phoenix Ancient Art SA., a major supplier of museum-quality antiquities, which stores ancient works of art at the Ports Francs et Entrepôts de Genève, a freeport located in a sprawling grey industrial building on the corner of a busy junction in southwest Geneva. 

For more information about freeports as a tax free haven to store art, please see a few of ARCA's earlier blog posts here, here, and here. 

At the time of the audit, authorities inspected the holdings of both Phoenix Ancient Art and its warehouseman and freight forwarder, Inanna Art Services.  During this inspection, Swiss authorities discovered, but didn't physically seize, a 1-2 ton, 150-180 CE Roman sarcophagus which depicted the twelve labours of the ancient Greek war deity, Hercules. According to customs information on file for the antiquity, the sarcophagus was imported into Switzerland in the name of Phoenix Ancient Art, which often used Inanna Art Services to store its goods or to transport works of art to and from other countries. 

This extraordinary ancient funerary object, likely only one of four of this significant quality documented in the ancient art world, had little in the way of detailed provenance.  For a piece of its quality to have nothing tying it to a previously known ancient art collection; no notations of its discovery or find spot, and nothing notable in the way of published scholarly examination of its style and iconography, rang alarm bells in Switzerland. 

In a recent video, with Al Jazeera news, Ali Aboutaam claimed that the ancient funerary object had been purchased by his father and had been in their family for 25 years. While under their control, he indicated that the sarcophagus had always been stored at the Geneva freeport aside from when it was shipped to the UK for conservation treatment.   Ali Aboutam added that in 2010 the object was sold to the Gandur Foundation as a donation to the Musée d’Art ed d’Histoire in Geneva and according to Phoenix Ancient Art's attorney Bastien Geiger, Sleiman Aboutaam purchased the object in the early 90s.

Phoenix Ancient Art had proposed the sarcophagus to billionaire Swiss tycoon and commodities trader, Jean-Claude Gandur in the spring of 2010 for an estimated $1 - 4 million saying that the firm was acting on behalf of a third party whom they interestingly refused to disclose.  Gandur, who made a fortune during the 1990s buying oil concessions in Africa, has long been a powerful collector of ancient art, as well as a long term patron of the Musée d’Art et d’histoire in Geneva. 

In consideration of the donation, Marc-André Haldimann, head of the archaeology department of the Musée d’Art ed d’Histoire of Geneva and the director of the museum, Jean-Yves Marin, went to the freeport and inspected the sarcophagus to carry out an appraisal for consideration.  The pair however remained highly skeptical of the lack of established information on the ancient sarcophagus, which implied possible illicit origins.  

How could such a prestigious object emerge on the ancient art market having never been talked or written about previously?   

Wouldn't the archaeologist who discovered such a masterpiece have mentioned this spectacular find in his or her field notes?  

Wouldn't a scholar of some repute have compared it in an academic article with the other known artworks by the same signatory group of sculptures or other sarcophagi depicting Hercules?

The only documentation Phoenix Ancient Art produced which attested to the fundamental question of this exceptional object's past, were independently established statements attesting that the ancient work of art was part of the Aboutaam collection from 2002 onward and a certificate from Art Loss Register attesting the object had been checked against ALR's known stolen art database registry.  Ultimately the sale to the Gandur Foundation was cancelled, in no small part because of suspicions that the object had been smuggled out of its source country. 

In March 2011, the Specialized Body for the International Transfer of Cultural Property at the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (FOC) issued a statement that they believed the sarcophagus had originated from the general area of the famous marble quarries of Dokimion in Phrygia, the present day Antalya region of Turkey. The Dokimeian white marble sarcophagus was likely sculpted sometime during the the second century, when the area was under Roman rule. 

Based on the FOC's examination, Swiss authorities alerted their counterparts in Ankara, and Turkey in turn, issued a demand for the restitution of the rare antiquarian work by a letter rogatory of July 2011. Turkey also sent a request for mutual assistance to the Geneva court and an inquiry was formally opened in Switzerland to look into alleged violations of the Cultural Property Transfer Act (LTBC).  This act requires art market professionals keep a register for 30 years, in which the "origin of the cultural property" is to be documented. 

In order for the sarcophagus to have been in good standing in Switzerland under the LTBC, the dealers would be obliged to prove that the acquired object was in an old collection outside the source country prior to 2005 or to demonstrate that the object was not stolen or exported illicitly after 2005.

In October 2013, the case made its way through Swiss court. The Geneva Chief Public Prosecution Office and the Chief Public Prosecutor of Antalya conducted a comprehensive joint study with the Swiss magistrate in charge of the case traveling to Antalya, Turkey where Turkish Public Prosecutor Osman Şanal provided access to witnesses.   

Testimonies were heard from Professor Haluk Abbasoğlu and Professor İnci Deleman who conducted excavations in the region where the sarcophagus was illegally excavated.   The Swiss prosecutor also met with an unnamed imprisoned smuggler serving time on a separate smuggling charge in Elmalı prison.  This smuggler allegedly confirmed that the artifact had been looted and smuggled out of Turkey. 

Based on the evidence gathered, on September 21, 2015 Swiss authorities ordered the repatriation of the sarcophagus. But international legal proceedings move at a snail’s pace and the return of this one object, approved by the Geneva Court of Justice on May 2, 2016, was slowed again, due to a challenge by the Swiss Federal Court. 




More on the dealers involved in this repatriation case.

Phoenix Ancient Art operates a gallery in New York city as well as in Geneva Switzerland.  Founded by Sleiman Aboutaam in 1968, the firm was incorporated in 1995.  The second-generation family business is now managed by Sleiman's sons, Hicham Aboutaam and Ali Aboutaam, who took over the firm's operation after Sleiman’s death in 1998.  The firm has been embroiled in a significant number of antiquities-related controversies. 

A sampling (not a complete listing) of other instances of concern involving this firm include:

A third-century CE South Arabian alabaster stele the brothers attempted to sell in May 2002 via Sotheby’s auction house in New York for approximately $20,000 to $30,000 in which they listed the provenance for the piece as having belonged to a private English collection. Sotheby's researchers conducting due diligence before the auction found published photographs of the stele indicating that this tablet, carved in low relief, with an image of the fertility goddess Dat-Hamin, had been stolen in July 1994 from the Aden Museum in Yemen's port city during the country's previous war.  This object was forfeited to the U.S. government in December 2003 and eventually returned to Yemen.  

Hicham Aboutaam was arrested in 2003 for smuggling a looted ceremonial drinking vessel from Iran into the US, claiming that it had come from Syria.  Hicham pled guilty to the charges in 2004, paid a fine, and the vessel was returned to the Iranian authorities.  Hicham Aboutaam stated that his conviction stemmed from a "lapse in judgment."

The Egyptian authorities have accused Ali Aboutaam of involvement with Tarek El-Suesy (al-Seweissi), who was arrested in 2003 under Egypt’s patrimony law for illegal export of antiquities. Ali Aboutaam was tried in absentia, pronounced guilty and was fined, and sentenced to 15 years in prison in the Egyptian court in April 2004.  To date, he has not served any of the Egyptian sentence. 

The Aboutaams voluntarily repatriated 251 Antiquities valued at $2.7 Million to the State of Italy in May 2009 tied to one of Italy's most notorious smuggling rings.

Advice on collecting ancient art

ARCA encourages its readers to remember that the only way to avoid looting is to pressure dealers and collectors to not participate directly or indirectly in looting through their sourcing and purchases.  Collectors of ancient art are only the most current stewards of objects with long and telling histories. The provenance, or ownership history of a piece of art is important and should detail strong proof that an object has come from a legitimately traded collection.  

Buying and trading in ancient works of art, without well documented collecting histories, simply for their beauty or for the purpose of rescuing them from countries in conflict, only encourages further looting and further laundering of smuggled illicit objects. 

ARCA strongly discourages collectors and museums from buying or accepting objects that cannot pass the 1970 test or which lack a legitimate export permit from the actual and correct country of the object's origin.

By: Lynda Albertson

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