Although Europol did not name the principal High-Value Target (HVT) in this multi-country police action, the agency noted that the investigation was triggered by a 2020 house search in Bulgaria in which authorities seized approximately 7,000 cultural artefacts of exceptional historical and monetary value.  According to the Europol statement, the material consisted largely of Greco-Roman and Thracian antiquities of remarkable quality and significance.  Bulgarian Prosecutor Angel Kanev, under national police protections for threats made to his life in this investigation, pointed out that the investigation centred on a case the country had been following for four years and involved coordination with law enforcement actions in Germany, Japan, Italy, the US, and the UK. 

The only publicly documented seizure of that scale, in Bulgaria, during 2020, was the government’s raid on the holdings of Bulgarian gaming tycoon Vasil Bozhkov, AKA Vassil Bojkov, whose business entities were searched on 20 January 2020 by the Specialised Prosecutor’s Office. Widely described as the country’s richest man, Bozhkov has long been referred to as the country's most notorious gangster, with allegations of money laundering, extortion, racketeering, tax fraud, and illegal antiquities dealing documented as early as a 2009 U.S. Embassy leaked diplomatic cable made public through WikiLeaks.

At the time of the 2020 search and subsequent seizure, Bozhkov faced seven criminal charges, including leading an organised crime group, coercion, extortion, attempted bribery of an official and incitement to malfeasance in office.  During the raid, prosecutors and police entered his offices at Nove Holding on Moskovska Street in Sofia and impounded 6,778 of the mogul's antiquities dating from as early as 4,000 BCE through the 6th century CE.  Shortly after these raids Bozhkov was handed additional charges, including influence trading and holding and expropriating valuable cultural artefacts.

Later, in June 2021, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Bozhkov, under E.O. 13818 for materially supporting corruption, misappropriation of state assets, and related criminal activity.  In February 2023, the United Kingdom followed suit and imposed sanctions under its Global Anti-Corruption sanctions regime.  After spending years in Dubai as a fugitive and avoiding extradition on a European arrest warrant, Bozhkov returned to Sofia voluntarily in August 2023 and remains at liberty with some restrictions while his numerous trials proceed through the Bulgarian courts.

The November Europol operation, coordinated this month, expands upon Bozhkov's earlier antiquities-related investigations and extends into multiple jurisdictions.

All of the aforementioned details provide a solid match to an affiliated professor of Classical Archaeology at Charles University in Prague named Athanasios Sideris.  According to this scholar's LinkedIn profile, he was the director of excavations in Halka Bunar, Bulgaria between 2009 and 2014 and from January 2017 until August 2022 was the Head Curator of the Thrace Foundation, in Sofia where he was responsible for curating and organising exhibitions and publications for Bozhkov's mostly unprovenanced antiquities collection. 

Sideris is also the author of several books featuring material from Bozhkov problematic ancient art collection.  One of these, Theseus in Thrace: the silver lining on the clouds of the Athenian-Thracian relations in the 5th century BC published by Bozhkov's Thrace Foundation in 2015, includes unprovenanced material from the Bozhkov Collection, as well as other unnamed private collections in Bulgaria, some of which have never been published previously.  At least two of the objects depicted in this catalogue have previously been in circulation with the Swiss gallery, Phoenix Ancient Art.  They are:

     • a Phiale depicting Thetis and Nereids bringing Achilles, 430-420 BCE

     • a Kylix belonging to the “Rhenia” type depicting a  Greco-Thracian rider. 430-420 BCE

How the current investigations will advance the cases against Bozhkov or those related to his enterprises remains to be seen, but it marks a significant escalation in ongoing efforts to dismantle transnational networks responsible for the looting, laundering, and illicit circulation of plundered cultural property in Europe. It also underscores how deeply embedded some actors have been within both academic and commercial sectors, blurring the boundaries between scholarship, private collecting, and illicit trade.

Vasil Bozhkov's antiquities collection ordered to be seized by Bulgarian authorities.

The less than clear origins of fugitive Vasil Bozhkov's Thrace and Private Collections.

Charge of unlawful possession of items of cultural value has been added to existing charges against Vasil Bozhkov.

TEFAF Maastricht 2022 Image Credit: ARCA

On 15 April 2024 and 19 April 2024, ARCA published two articles building on an announcement made by Spain's Ministry of the Interior which involved the identification of a looted Egyptian object. That investigation involved the Policía Nacional's Historical Heritage Brigade in collaboration with the Dutch Politie, the expertise of an extremely knowledgeable forensic scholar, and the assistance of a cooperating art gallery. With their combined efforts, the Swiss dealer voluntarily relinquished the suspect antiquity to the Dutch police.

Yesterday, Caretaker Prime Minister Dick Schoof, in a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, announced that the Netherlands will hand over that same stolen sculpture by the end of the year.

Too frequently, antiquities restitution reporting becomes formulaic, providing only cursory information on an object's country of origin, value, age, and the agencies responsible for its seizure or restitution. This happened once again in this case, where one Dutch article reduced the historic object to its most basic description, “a 3,500-year-old stone head from the dynasty of Pharaoh Thutmose III,” followed by a brief paragraph speculating that the piece might be put on display at Egypt's the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which officially opened yesterday.

Basic shapes of block statues

ARCA, being a research-based organisation which specifically examines  crimes that impact art and artefacts, does its best to provide more details to problematic pieces and the problematic dealers that profit from them. Our reporting serves as a means of holding people accountable and reminding individuals of the need to collect responsibly. 

The artefact being returned is not just an Egyptian "head".  It is a decapitated head broken off of an 18th Dynasty Egyptian block statue that was likely intentionally hacked off its body, or deliberately broken at the shoulders for ease of smuggling. Had it been intact, this memorial statue would have shown a man crouched and wrapped in a cloak, inscribed, at the very least with the name of the owner, incised on the body, the base, or the back pillar if one existed. 

Our original reporting touched on what we were able to ascertain about this disembodied head of a squatting man. We knew he was documented on social media sites and came up for sale through a Swiss-based art dealer during the short-lived European Fine Art Fair in 2020 and again with this same dealer when the fair reopened post-Covid in 2022.  Having been the subject of a joint-European policing initiative we know that authorities were convinced he was illegally exported from Egypt in contravention of the country's cultural property laws, then transited through intermediaries in Thailand before being first put up for sale in Barcelona, where it was sold by controversial gallery owner, Jaume Bagot Peix, of J. Bagot Arqueología.

As early as 2015 Bagot's problematic purchasing had placed him on the radar of Policía Judicial y de la UCIE de la Comisaría General de Información.  In 2018, he and Oriol Carreras Palomar were formally charged for their alleged participation in a crime of financing terrorism, belonging to a criminal organisation, concealment of contraband, and use of forgery for their roles in facilitating the sale of illicit antiquities involving pieces trafficked from a second war torn country, Libya.  

Bagot also was charged, and subsequently convicted in Italy, related to a stolen Roman statue and has been linked to a stolen Egyptian ushabti from Sudan, which was again circulated on the art market with falsified provenance documentation. That artefact was sold to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in the Netherlands.  

But despite being suspected of trafficking material from at least three war-torn countries, and having one conviction in mainland Europe while other cases in other jurisdictions pile up, Bagot continues to receive favourable coverage in the press and has been described as operating "one of the most renowned ancient art galleries in Spain."  He also continues to be granted booths and promotion by Spain's Feriarte, an important annual art fair held at IFEMA Madrid, most recently from 18 to 26 October 2025, as well as at ANTIK Almoneda, another Madrid art sales event held from 22 to 30 March 2025.

All this demonstrates how long justice can take. In this Dutch restitution, it will have required five years from this objects initial sighting and identification at TEFAF in 2020 until its ultimate return to Egypt later this year and even longer for these problematic Spanish dealers to face the consequences of their actions. This case, like a second Bagot-related case in Belgium involving the the recent restitution of the Egyptian coffin of Pa-di-Hor-pa-khered, which was stolen from an archaeological site in Egypt in December 2015 and restituted in July 2025 both serve as reminders that restitution is not simply a bureaucratic exercise; it is a fight against a global market that too often rewards negligence and turns a blind eye to complicity. 

Until the art trade adopts a genuine commitment to better behaviour, transparency and due diligence, and holds its art market actors accountable, the cycle of loss, recovery, protracted restitution, and delayed accountability will continue, slowly, one object at a time.

Egyptian authorities report the seizure of 577 artefacts in the Minya governorate in Upper Egypt, spanning the Middle Kingdom, Late Period, and Greco-Roman eras of ancient Egyptian history. 

The operation was conducted by the General Administration of Tourism and Antiquities Investigations, coordinated with the Public Security Sector and the Criminal Investigation Department, under the oversight of senior law enforcement officers Major General Mohamed Ragab and Major General Mohamed Zein. As a result of this investigation, a search warrant was executed not far from Lotus University at the residence of Islam A.M., an appliance dealer.  This resulted in the recovery of this large grouping of artefacts ,as well as the arrest of their intended seller, whose name was not given in full.

The ancient objects seized include this decorated 60-centimeter painted and gessoed wooden statue of a woman carrying offerings on her head, a cylindrical wooden image of Bes, the fertility god, and a basalt statue of Horus, missing its head from ancient erosion. 

Other notable objects include a painted pottery statue, and a green stone carving depicting four women.  Wood and faience ushabti figures suggest that at least some of the artefacts were looted from funerary contexts. 

In addition to these, 503 silver and bronze coins, were discovered, pointing to a diverse cache of both ritual and utilitarian items. 

According to Egyptian news sites, preliminary evaluation by antiquities inspectors confirm the authenticity of the artefacts seized as well as their protection under Egypt’s Antiquities Protection Law No. 117 of 1983. 

Like many such cases, the looter's intent was to sell the objects on the black market, where demand for Egyptian antiquities internationally remains high, forcing looters to plunder remote locations or utilise creative means to avoid having their illicit excavation activities detected.

In 2024 residents of Minya Governorate, especially those who bury their contemporary loved ones in the cemeteries in Zawiyat Sultan, Al-Matahira, and the Cairo-Assiut Desert Road, complained to the authorities that thieves were stealing the metal doors of tombs and that graves were being broken into.  It was discovered that gaining access to these modern internment spaces allowed looters to dig deep holes undetected in search of antiquities. 

The richness of the Minya Governorate is well known. In April 2017, Nedjemankh’s famous golden coffin flew to New York on American Airlines after it was looted from the Minya region in October 2011. 

In 2016, A'srāwy Kāmel Jād, a site guard was shot dead by looters, while a second watchman, Ali Khalaf Shāker, who was also on duty was gravely wounded and succumbed to his injuries later.  The pair had been on duty protecting Deir el-Bersha an archaeological site located on the east bank of the Nile, south of Hermopolis, which is part of the same governorate. 

For those thinking of taking up looting as a hobby, it should be remembered that Article 41 of Egypt's antiquities law stipulates that anyone who smuggles an antiquity out of the country or participates in smuggling it shall be punished by hard labor and a fine of no less than 5,000 Egyptian pounds and no more than 50,000 Egyptian pounds. Article 42 stipulates that anyone who steals or conceals an antiquity or part of an antiquity owned by a state shall be punished by imprisonment for a period of no less than 5 years.

The anthropomorphic coffin of Pa-di-Hor-pa-khered, believed to have belonged to a member of Egypt’s elite during the Ptolemaic era (4th–3rd century BCE), represents a compelling case in the study of illicit antiquities circulation and restitution.

In October 2016, a file is opened at the Brussels Public Prosecutor's Office (Notice number BR.68.LL.101942/2016)  for suspicion of art trafficking, regarding a striking gold-faced coffin once believed to have rested undisturbed in a necropolis in ancient Egypt.

The artefact made headlines this week in the cloister of the Royal Museums of Art and History, at the Cinquantenaire, not for its craftsmanship or symbolism, but because it was being restituted after having been illegally trafficked, and handled by multiple ancient art dealers and intermediaries, including Europeans Jacques Billen of Galerie Harmakhis in Belgium and Jaume Bagot Peix, operator of J. Bagot Arqueología in Barcelona.  The coffin's former occupant was a man by the name of Pa-di-Hor-pa-khered, (he who was given by Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis), his body long since dumped along the way.  Despite it's beautiful inscriptions, meticulous workmanship and coloured glass inlays in the eyes and breastplate, without its occupant it is just another sad example of how looted burial antiquities move—quietly, persistently, and without mercy or respect for the deal—through the global art market.

According to an article from Paris Match Belgique in December 2017, the coffin, along with a stone statuette had been stolen from an archaeological site in Egypt in December 2015 and where then smuggled out of the source country, ultimately ending up with the ancient art dealer in Le Sablon, in Brussels.  But despite these objects identification a decade ago, the coffin's return to HE Mr. Ahmed ABU ZEID, the Ambassador of the Arab Republic of Egypt to Belgium, Luxembourg and to the European Union and NATO, was just the final step in a long and complex legal procedure to bring the artefacts home.

Initiated following an international letter rogatory issued by the Attorney General of Cairo, and assisted by law enforcement partners in multiple European countries, the judgment requiring the artefact's restitution was issued by the Court of Cassation in Belgium on 9 April 2025. 

But this story isn’t just about one object. It’s about how looting, laundering, and legitimate-seeming sales and business relationships all intersect, and how buyers, sometimes unwittingly, often become the final link in a long and illegal chain. And it’s also a reminder that an object once buried with care over 2,000 years ago can (still) tie up judges and lawyers in legal battles, diplomatic gestures, and unending debates about who owns the past in the 21st century.

I would like to think the underworld god Osiris has kept watch over where this man’s body ultimately lays. 

In a coordinated operation on Monday, the Dimona Police and the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) uncovered a significant cache of antiquities during a search of a private residence in the southern Israeli city of Dimona. Approximately 200 ancient items were seized, including coins, arrowheads, intact pottery vessels, oil lamps, glass beads, pendants, and other cultural artifacts.

Preliminary assessments by the IAA indicate that the recovered items span a broad historical range—from the Iron Age (9th century BCE) to the 7th century CE, the period marking the rise of Arab Muslim expansion across the region.  The 40-year-old resident of the home, located in Dimona, approximately 30 kilometers southeast of Beersheba and 35 kilometers west of the Dead Sea, was detained for overnight questioning and could face charges of illegal possession of antiquities. 

In addition to the artefacts, police also recovered two metal detectors, a large amount of ammunition, and various types of "airsoft" weapons.  Bear in mind that airsoft guns are replica firearms that use compressed air, at a low velocity, to propel small plastic pellets (typically 6mm BBs) originally designed for use in simulated combat games.  While not considered firearms in most jurisdictions, airsoft guns and similar items have been imported to Israel as toys, and later converted by changing the barrel and the internal mechanism to allow it to hold live rounds. These “converted weapons” are less powerful (and cheaper) than traditionally manufactured firearms, but they can easily still harm and even kill people,

By May 2022, Israel's "Airsoft" Law(Amendment No. 23), 2022, past its first reading in the Knesset, following the Ministry of Public Security's request to regulate the sphere of dangerous "toys", highlighting a recorded 195% increase since the beginning of 2018 in seizing of Airsoft guns that have been modified and converted into makeshift weapons which could make their way into the hands of terrorists and crime organisations.

The law proposed stipulated that any activity involving the manufacture, import, export, storage, transportation and trading in replica firearms will require a license, similar to a firearms license and the use, possession and carrying of these guns is to  occur in shooting clubs only, which will be issued a license by the Firearm Licensing Department.  That bill also included a penal clause of three to five years of imprisonment for execution of various types of modifications to replica firearms.  

Whether or not the airsoft weapons in this instance had been modified is not clear in the varying Israeli news reports. What is known is that in addition to the antiquities, cash in excess of NIS 150,000 (+/-€35,000) was also recovered. 

TEFAF Maastricht 2020 Image Credit: ARCA

According to Spain's Ministry of the Interior, following an investigation begun in 2023, the Policía Nacional have arrested a Barcelona gallery owner (Jaume Bagot Peix, operator of J. Bagot Arqueología) for allegedly committing the crimes of money laundering, smuggling, and document falsification in relation to this black granite head of a funerary monument for a high ranking official from the reign of Hatshepsut or Tuthmosis III in Egypt. 

TEFAF Maastricht 2022 Image Credit: ARCA

Valued at 190,000 euros, the circa 1504-1450 BCE artefact had been acquired by the Barcelona ancient art dealer in July 2015 via an intermediary in Bangkok, Thailand.  ARCA notes that this partial statue was documented on social media sites and up for sale through a Swiss-based art dealer during the short-lived European Fine Art Fair in 2020 and again with this same dealer when the fair reopened post-Covid in 2022.  

Having been the subject of a joint-European policing initiative which resulted in law enforcement authorities with the Dutch Politie in the Netherlands sharing evidence with their Spanish counterparts, police in Spain were able to concretised that this Egyptian artefact was illicit, despite it having been in free circulation for seven years through several sales passages occurring via dealers in Spain, Germany, and Switzerland.  Prior to these transactions, the object had traveled though the transit county of Thailand via an intermediary in Bangkok. 

The 18th Dynasty head depicts its patron wearing a short wig revealing the ears as well as defined almond-shaped eyes and prominent eyebrows.  In its complete and original form, the head would have once been attached at the shoulders to the rest of its memorial block statue representing a seated non-royal person.  

The Swiss gallery that had purchased the artwork via another ancient art dealer in Germany, freely relinquished the artefact to the Dutch authorities once it was determined that the piece was suspect and had been acquired via the Spanish gallery owner, who had already been linked to the illicit trade in antiquities in conflict zones such as North Africa and the Middle East. 

To circulate this illicit artefact, the Spanish gallerist provided his trusting buyer, with a document that substituted collected information relating to several archaeological pieces belonging to a Spanish collection from the 70s making it appear as though the head had been part of a legitimate and documented collection prior to Egypt's antiquities laws tightening in 1983.  A not uncommon technique, suspect dealers have often attempted to "whiten" freshly looted material, by substituting, reusing, or outright fabricating documents of ownership, which, if not carefully explored, cosmetically appear to provide a legitimate "pedigree" to an antiquity which in reality is more recent plunder from an illicit excavation.  

It is for this reason, that the dealer who has been arrested has been charged not only with smuggling and money laundering, but also with document falsification of the object's provenance record. 

Point of reference in 2018, Frédéric Loore revealed in Paris Match that Jaume Bagot's network used various smuggling routes, notably via Egypt and Jordan to the United Arab Emirates, before returning to Catalonia after transiting through Germany or Thailand.

By:  Lynda Albertson

NB: For now, the Spanish authorities have elected to publish their arrest announcement withholding the name of the charged ancient art dealer.  

As those who read our earlier article this week have seen, ARCA matched several of the recovered jewellery pieces to exhibitions which displayed 21 pieces of jewellery owned by LLC Rodovid Museum.  This relatively new company is controlled by Ukrainian businessman Igor Didkovsky, who, during the presidency of now deposed Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko, was once the director of the Art Arsenal from 2007 to 2010.  

From August 2007 to June 2009, Didkovsky also headed the Viche political party, which has since changed its name to Aktsent (in 2018).  Didkovsky has described himself as the president of the RODOVID group of companies as well as the Chairman of the supervisory board of ВАТ КУА ІСІ "МИР", which appears to be a closed-end venture investment fund.  

Interviewed in 2012, Didkovsky boasted that he was the owner of the largest collection of Scythian gold in the world. At the time of these statements, it was reported that his collection included 4 pectorals as well as the only belt of a Scythian queen.  All of which the collector claimed to have purchased for "a small amount of money."   

Igor Didkovsky and the belt of a Scythian queen

Didkovsky's collection has been displayed in 2009 in an Art Arsenal exhibition titled “From the Depths”. In 2010 it popped up briefly at a meeting of the "Club of Successful Women", in Kyiv.  And lastly, over three days, the gold was displayed at the International Forum of Investment and Innovation held at the Fairmont Grand Hotel Kyiv from May 15 -17, 2013.  

As has been stated in the Policia Nacional press release, the joint Spanish - Ukrainian investigation was kickstarted in 2021 with the private sale of what was described as a Scythian "gold belt with ram heads that was deposited in a safe in Madrid."   If the object identified in the Spain case is the same belt of a Scythian queen mentioned by Didkovsky, we now have a Facebook social media photo identifying that specific artefact, when it was listed as part of the exhibition held at the Kyiv hotel.

Black Archaeology + wealth + unethical collecting + confllict excavations

At its peak in the Middle Ages, the Slavic kingdom of the Kyivan Rus, as Ukraine was then known, extended north from the Black Sea to encompass most of what is now western Russia.  Rich in history, Ukraine's movable cultural heritage includes material from Paleolithic and Neolithic settlements, the settlements of the Trypillian people, and the rare, but glittery, gold-filled Scythian and Sarmatian burial sites.

Other Scythian sites can be found on either side of the Kerch Straits between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, as well as in the Caucasus Mountains primarily along the Kuban River and in the contested area of Crimea.  

Unfortunately, privately collecting by the country's elite who too often have an odious lack of concern for an object's origins, is all too prevalent.  Following its independence, Ukraine has seen the rise of several private archaeological collections, of which only a few have any footprint in the public domain.  

In addition to Didkovsky's we also have the Feldman collection, which was started by Oleksandr Feldman, and is now part of the Feldman Family Museum project in Kharkiv, the Platar and the Yushchenko collections.

Sergei Platonov died in 2005, leaving his ancient art collection, the Platar, to his heirs and business partners.  While living, he often indicated that he and his colleague, politician Sergey Taruta, bought material specifically to protect Ukraine's heritage from avaricious foreigners.  Like Didkovsky, Platonov didn't shy away from acknowledging to have purchased artefacts sourced via black archaeology -- the looting of archaeological sites, rather than through the ethical purchase of artefacts already in circulation from legitimate sources. 

Recently, in May 2023 Censor.NET journalist Tetyana Nikolayenko published a copy of the letter in which the Security Service of Ukraine confirmed the opening of an investigation after State Customs at the border in the Lviv region detained Chinese objects from the same Platar collection mentioned earlier.  According to statements by this collection's patrons, Sergei Platonov's son Mykola Platonov and Sergey Taruta, the items were being exported to Prague for an exhibition at the Galerie Gema s.r.o, a rather oddly selected venue for historic pieces of that calibre. 

In 2021, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation issued a permit for archaeological work in occupied Crimea specifically at the site of Chersonesus.  Working in an area covering some 400,000 square meters, the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Archaeology of Crimea of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Sevastopol State University began excavating, in some cases using heavy equipment and improper scientific methods as trenches were cleared.

This exploration is openly reported on the Hermitage website, despite the fact that it  violates the 1954 Hague Convention,

According to this report published by the State Hermatage Museum, excavations by their researchers uncovered 70 objects which were then transferred to the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia in contravention of Ukraine's cultural heritage laws.   

These objects included:

"a set of dishes for a funeral meal (jugs, bowls, drinking vessels), clay lamps, glass balsamaria, bone and bronze pyxides, small household items made of non-ferrous and precious metals, jewelry and clothing decorative elements, agate and carnelian beads, pendants from Egyptian faience. Gold eyecups and mouthpieces were discovered in the urns - details of the funeral rites of noble citizens of Roman times."

It should be underscored that the provisions of the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict states as follows:

Article 9 - Protection of cultural property in occupied territory 

1. Without prejudice to the provisions of Articles 4 and 5 of the Convention, a Party in occupation of the whole or part of the territory of another Party shall prohibit and prevent in relation to the occupied territory: 

(a) any illicit export, other removal or transfer of ownership of cultural property; 

(b) any archaeological excavation, save where this is strictly required to safeguard, record or preserve cultural property; 

(c) any alteration to, or change of use of, cultural property which is intended to conceal or destroy cultural, historical or scientific evidence. 

2. Any archaeological excavation of, alteration to, or change of use of, cultural property in occupied territory shall, unless circumstances do not permit, be carried out in close cooperation with the competent national authorities of the occupied territory.

Just my way of saying to those in a position of wealth and/or power the axe forgets, but the tree remembers.

By:  Lynda Albertson