COLOGNE, Germany (AFP) – A German court sentenced a ring offour art forgers Thursday for copying Expressionist artworks by masters such as Max Ernst and Max Pechstein and selling them in a Europe-wide scam.
The two men and two women, all Germans including a married couple, admitted selling copies of 14 works for millions of euros in one of the largest schemes of its kind in recent decades, the court in the western city of Cologne said.
According to the mass-circulation Bild newspaper, the quartet sold a fake Heinrich Campendonk painting to Hollywood comedian Steve Martin for 850,000 euros ($1.2 million).
They reportedly also swindled German billionaire Reinhold Wuerth, owner of a museum in Alsace, according to the paper.
Forger Wolfgang Beltracchi, 60, received the heaviest sentence of six years, while his wife Helene, 53, was jailed for four years. Her sister, Jeanette Spurzem, 54, was given a suspended sentence of a year and nine months.
The fourth member of the ring, Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus, 68, was jailed for five years.
The defendants, who could have faced 10 years in prison, were offered lighter sentences in exchange for full confessions.
Equatorial Guinea’s President President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, whose son is under investigation by the U.S. government. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Brazil license.
LOS ANGELES (AP) – The son of Equatorial Guinea’s president plundered his country’s natural resources through corruption, spending more than $70 million in looted profits on a Malibu mansion, a Gulfstream jet and Michael Jackson memorabilia, the U.S. government said.
In what appeared to be a concerted action, France last month seized 11 luxury sports cars belonging to Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue, a government minister in the West African country and heir-apparent to the presidency. And a Spanish investigative judge has been asked to seize properties in Madrid and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands owned by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, his sons and some ministers, acting on a case brought by the Pro-Human Rights Association of Spain.
Teodorin Obiang, who is in his early 40s, used his position to siphon millions of dollars for his own personal use, U.S. authorities said in two civil forfeiture complaints filed in the District Court in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The complaints say Obiang’s assets can be forfeited because he engaged in misappropriation and theft of public funds for his benefit.
The U.S. government is seeking to recover $70 million in stolen funds from Obiang for “the benefit of the people of the country from which it was taken.”
“We are sending the message loud and clear: The United States will not be a hiding place for the ill-gotten riches of the world’s corrupt leaders,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.
An email message left for Purificacion Angue Ondo, Equatorial Guinea’s ambassador to the U.S., was not immediately returned. President Obiang has denied charges of corruption in the past. Teodorin Obiang told a South African court in 2005, in a dispute about two Cape Town mansions valued at $4 million, that he earned $4,000 a month as a minister but that in his country it is legal for companies owned by ministers to bid for government contracts with foreign groups and receive “a percentage of the total contract.”
U.S. authorities believe Teodorin Obiang amassed more than $100 million through various schemes while he served as the country’s forestry minister. His current government salary is about $6,800 a month, according to court documents.
The U.S. action follows years of investigations including a Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Department probe that showed Obiang transferred about $75 million into U.S. banks between 2005 and 2007, and indicated U.S. banks had not shown due diligence.
This came after the Obiang fortunes helped bring down the once-venerable Riggs Bank in 2004, when a U.S. Senate Committee investigation found the bank had “turned a blind eye” to evidence it was handling proceeds of foreign corruption in deposits of some $700 million deposited by its biggest customers – Equatorial Guinea government entities, senior officials and Obiang family members. One bank official gave evidence that more than a million dollars was brought to the bank in one instance in cash enfolded in plastic wrap.
Some $26.5 million of that was transferred in suspicious transactions to Banco Santander in Spain, and used to buy properties being investigated there.
The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last year found that powerful Equatorial Guinea officials and their families used attorneys, real estate agents and lobbyists to circumvent anti-corruption laws.
Human rights groups including the Global Witness and the Open Society Justice Initiative for years have been asking the United States to deny visas to the Obiang family and seize their property under U.S. laws against unjust or illicit enrichment.
It was unclear why the action suddenly was being taken. A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, Laura Sweeney, declined to comment “at this time” in an email response to questions. Ken Hurwitz, senior legal officer at the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative, said he had heard reports that the Malibu property was being put up for sale.
Equatorial Guinea was a backwater until American energy company Exxon Mobil discovered oil and gas there in 1994. U.S. companies continue to dominate the industry there but face growing competition. Most oil from the country, which produces billions of dollars in annual revenue, is exported to the United States.
Despite its newfound wealth, life for the vast majority of the country’s 680,000 people remains a struggle and the majority live below the poverty line with tens of thousands having no access to electricity or clean water, according to U.N. and World Bank figures.
Earlier this year, Global Witness reported that Teodorin Obiang had commissioned plans to build a superyacht costing $380 million – nearly three times what the country spends on health and education each year.
U.S. authorities said Teodorin Obiang spent $30 million on a Malibu mansion, $38.5 million on a Gulfstream jet and about $3.2 million on Michael Jackson memorabilia, including a crystal-covered glove from the “Bad” tour and a basketball signed by the singer and former Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan.
Among the other items purchased by Obiang, according to federal officials, was a 2011 Ferrari automobile valued at more than $530,000. Obiang also stored 24 luxury cars worth nearly $10 million at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles and shipped them to France. Among the supercars seized in France last month are Maseratis, two limited edition Bugatti Veyrons, Maseratis, Ferraris, Porsches and Rolls Royces.
Obiang would give various stories to banks that questioned where he had received large sums of cash from, authorities said. When Obiang opened an account at a California bank in 2007, he claimed that he acquired money from a family inheritance and from trading expensive and custom automobiles, court documents show.
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Associated Press writer Michelle Faul contributed to this report from Johannesburg.
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NEW YORK (LAPRS) – LiveAuctioneers.com, the Manhattan-based technology company that provides Internet live-bidding services to more than 1,100 auction houses worldwide, has released third-quarter statistics confirming a dramatic increase in site traffic, unique visitors and webpage views.
During the third quarter of 2011, there were more than 4.2 million “absolute unique” visitors to LiveAuctioneers.com. This figure reflects a 36.2% increase over the comparable quarter of 2010 and is enhanced by a further statistic: the average time spent on the site is now an incredible 4½ minutes per unique visitor.
Last quarter there was also a sizable jump in the number of overall visits to the LiveAuctioneers site, soaring from 4.8 million in Q3 2010 to more than 7 million in this year’s comparable quarter – an increase of 48.4%.
“During the third quarter, we recorded more than 55 million catalog page views on the site, as compared to 37.2 million in the corresponding quarter of 2010 – a rise of more than 48 percent,” said Julian R. Ellison, CEO of LiveAuctioneers LLC.
Ellison added that the flow of traffic redirected to LiveAuctioneers from search engines spiked 54.55% over the comparable quarter of last year. “During the months of July, August and September – which are traditionally thought of as being slow months in the antiques and fine art sector – there were 4.1 million search-engine referrals to LiveAuctioneers. If there was a quiet period this summer, we didn’t see it.” Also, during Q3 of 2011, LiveAuctioneers.com attracted an average of 2,948 new-bidder signups per week.
“The upward momentum has been just as strong within our corporate infrastructure,” Ellison said. “Over the last quarter our digital arts publication Auction Central News (www.auctioncentralnews.com) added columnists and features to its roster and continued to build on its reputation as a powerful platform for auction house exposure worldwide. Auctioneers tell us that as soon as a preview appears on ACN, their online catalogs start receiving hits and bids.”
Also in Q3, LiveAuctioneers PR Services (LAPRS), a boutique in-house agency that creates and manages publicity campaigns, added staff to accommodate the increasing demand from auction-house clients. The agency also incorporates LiveAuctioneers Design Services, or LADS, which produces custom-designed ads, newsletters, e-mail blasts and other marketing products, primarily for auction houses.
Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. June 30, 2007 photo by gaku, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Yahoo shares rose about 3 percent Monday as investors reacted to the possibility that Google may help finance a takeover bid if its troubled Internet rival decides to sell.
The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that Google Inc. has been in touch with two of the buyout firms that have been stalking Yahoo Inc. since Yahoo fired Carol Bartz as its CEO seven weeks ago. The story, based on an unidentified person familiar with the matter, said Google could provide some of the financing for a Yahoo takeover.
The story did not say with which firms Google was talking.
Google spokeswoman Katelin Todhunter-Gerberg said the company doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation. Yahoo spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek declined to comment for the same reason.
A long list of prospective suitors has been eyeing Yahoo, whose board has been assessing whether it makes more sense to auction off the company instead of hiring a permanent replacement for Bartz. Tim Morse, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, has been running the company on an interim basis.
Alibaba Group, a Chinese Internet company partially owned by Yahoo, is the only bidder that has publicly declared its interest in mounting a takeover attempt. Others reported to be mulling an offer include buyout firms KKR & Co., the Blackstone Group, and Silver Lake Partners. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz’s name also has popped up. Microsoft Corp., which unsuccessfully tried to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion in 2008, has been reported to be weighing whether to help finance a Silver Lake bid.
The takeover talk has helped lift Yahoo’s stock price by nearly 30 percent since Bartz’s ouster.
Yahoo’s shares rose 47 cents, or 2.9 percent, to $16.61 in afternoon trading. Google shares rose $8.22 to $598.71.
But Google’s dominance in the lucrative Internet search market will make it difficult for it to get involved in a Yahoo takeover attempt. When Google struck a deal to sell advertising alongside Yahoo’s search results, the U.S. Justice Department threatened to sue because the agency had concluded it would undercut competition. Google backed out of the Yahoo alliance to avoid going to court.
The Journal’s story stressed that Google may decide not to entangle itself in a Yahoo takeover attempt.
It’s still not even clear whether Yahoo will put itself up for sale as it explores ways to appease shareholders. Many stockholders are frustrated with the company’s declining revenue at a time when the overall Internet advertising market is growing.
Yahoo’s board hasn’t set a timetable for determining its next step. The board has hired investment bankers Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Allen & Co. to help assess the situation.
Despite its financial funk, Yahoo remains an attractive takeover candidate because it boasts an Internet audience of about 700 million people and owns prized stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Museum curators say one of the bronze sculptures recently stolen from the Johannesburg Art Gallery is worth about $16,000. They fear thieves sold it to a scrap dealer for a mere $250.
Prices for metals with industrial uses like copper — the main component in bronze — have been booming. And as the stolen bronzes fail to turn up at auction houses, galleries can only fear the worst.
“I understand that art will be stolen,” said Noah Charney, who founded a think tank called the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art. “But I get very upset when art is destroyed … that is an irrevocable attack on beauty, culture and civilization.”
Bronze sculptures are only the latest target in South Africa: Days before U2 played a stadium in Johannesburg earlier this year, officials blamed copper thieves for power problems at the venue. Cable theft has led to service interruptions on the Gautrain, a sleek new South African light rail service.
At the Johannesburg Art Gallery, home to Picassos, van Goghs and Rodins, thieves stole a figure of a woman in mourning by South African master sculptor Sydney Kumalo. The Kumalo is one of a total of four bronzes taken in a robbery in January and another in September at the city-owned gallery.
A small bronze titled “A chair, a boat and a vase” by well-known South African sculptor Barend De Wet was wrenched from the facade of the national art museum in Cape Town in May.
“There’s a lot of very sophisticated (security) systems internationally that, unfortunately, we just can’t afford,” said Antoinette Murdoch, chief curator of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Murdoch said the city has promised her 1 million rand (about $125,000) to upgrade security, and she is seeking more from donors.
Bernard Maguire, spokesman for the Metal Recyclers Association, said his industry group alerts scrap dealers across South Africa when a theft, whether of copper wire or a bronze statue, is reported.
“If they are caught with it, they can’t say that they didn’t know,” he said.
He said the members code of conduct also makes it clear that “if you do suspect something is stolen, you’re duty bound to communicate that to police.” But he said some items are cut up before they even reach dealers.
South Africa, well known for its high rates of murder and other violent crimes, is only the latest country where copper thieves are targeting art.
In one stunning case in 2005, thieves took a two-ton, $5.2 million bronze by famed English sculpture Henry Moore from the artist’s estate north of London. Police, saying “Reclining Figure” was too well known to have been sold on the art market, said the thieves may have stolen the work to melt it down and sell it for a fraction of its value as scrap.
The phenomenon also has been seen in Latin America, where vandals in Brazil sawed off the arms of a bronze statue of soccer legend Pele in 2007.
“It’s all about bronze and about the copper in bronze,” Ton Cremers, former head of security at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, said in a telephone interview. “Very few thefts of sculptures are solved. I think it’s less than 5 percent. They damage the sculpture right away. Within a day, the sculpture disappears. That makes it very difficult to solve these cases.”
Cremers recommends that steel skeletons be built inside larger bronzes to make it harder for thieves to cut them into pieces and cart them away. Smaller pieces can be fitted with electronic devices, the same strategy boutiques use to keep shoplifters from walking off with clothing. He acknowledges, though, that such fixes might be beyond the budgets of museums in poor countries.
Gordon Massie, managing director of a Johannesburg company that specializes in ensuring fine art, said the true extent of the problem may never be known because private collectors who have lost bronzes don’t want to invite attention. And some government galleries refuse to list losses on their site for fear they’ll be accused of failing to care for their nation’s heritage.
Two years ago, Massie said, a registry of thefts he makes public in an effort to ensure pieces are recovered listed no stolen bronzes. Last year, there was one. This year, there have been five — four alone from the Johannesburg gallery and the one from the national gallery.
The Johannesburg Art Gallery is not a client, but Massie listed its losses because he wanted to help. The cash-strapped gallery has had to cut back on gardeners and can’t afford a badly needed new roof and air conditioning system.
“They’re in a woeful position of holding the nation’s treasures and having no budget,” Massie said. “One has to have a lot of empathy with the directors and curators. It’s not their choice to have poor security.”
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Donna Bryson can be reached on http://twitter.com/dbrysonAP
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
BUFFALO, New York (AP) – A possible 16th-century Michelangelo painting that hung for years in a local family’s home is being displayed in Rome as part of an exhibit of Renaissance art, a development its owner calls a major milestone as he works to have it accepted by the art world.
Scholars disagree on whether “La Pieta With Two Angels” was painted by Michelangelo or by one of his collaborators.
For now, the 19-by-25-inch(48-by-63-centimeter) work is described as “Michelangelesque” in a show sponsored by the philanthropic Rome Foundation, which transported the painting from the Buffalo area to Rome and funded its restoration over the past six months. It will be one of 170 pieces on display from Tuesday through Feb. 12 as part of “The Renaissance in Rome: A Token to Michelangelo and Raphael.”
The circa 1545 painting, which shows Mary with her arms open over the body of Jesus, whose arms are held by angels, has been restored “to near its original splendor,” said owner Martin Kober, who was in Italy for the opening.
“It’s a major milestone for the painting to be included in an exhibit of this caliber and hang beside generally acknowledged works by Michelangelo, Raphael and other major Renaissance painters,” Kober said.
The painting was the subject of a book, ‘The Lost Pieta,” by Italian art historian Antonio Forcellino, who’s convinced it’s a Michelangelo. The book was published last year, around the time Kober went public with the family heirloom and his efforts to see it take its place in art history.
For many years, the painting hung at the Kober family home, where it was affectionately known as ‘The Mike.” Kober, who lives in Tonawanda, north of Buffalo, recalls it deflecting an errant tennis ball when he and his brothers were roughhousing as kids. It eventually was tucked into a leather art portfolio for safekeeping and was stored behind a couch for 25 years after being knocked off the wall while being dusted.
Kober began researching the painting full time following his 2002 retirement from the Air Force, and he got Forcellino to take a look. If the painting is, like the Sistine Chapel and the statue of David, the work of the Italian master, it’s estimated to be worth from $100 million to $300 million.
According to Kober, the painting originally was created for Michelangelo’s friend Vittoria Colonna when Michelangelo was about 70 and was passed to a Catholic cardinal, an archbishop and a family in Croatia that hung it in palaces. Kober says that through marriage it found its way to a German baroness who willed it to his great-great-grandfather’s sister-in-law.
The painting, after arriving in America in 1883, hung briefly in a Syracuse museum and in a temporary exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition opening Tuesday marks the first time since 1885 that it has been publicly displayed.
Michelangelo authority William E. Wallace, after examining the painting last year, stopped short of saying it was the work of Michelangelo’s brush – but didn’t rule out the possibility.
“There’s never proof, unfortunately,” Wallace, an art history professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said then. “You can do scientific analysis of the paint and the surface and the panel, and all that tells you is we’re dealing with something old from the 16th century.”
Even so, Wallace said, the painting’s age and well-documented history make it deserving of display and the chance for scholarly debate about its origins.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – An international art exhibition has opened in New Orleans.
“Prospect.2” – a follow-up to the “Prospect.1” exhibition of 2008 – opened Saturday. TheTimes-Picayune reports that the exhibition includes 28 displays and performances aimed at an avant-garde audience.
It’s also taking place amid a change in management. Director Dan Cameron, the former curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, is stepping down as director of the “Prospect” series. The board that runs the exhibition will search for a new executive director. Meanwhile, Franklin Sirmans, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will be curator for “Prospect.3,” which is scheduled for fall 2013.
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Information from: The Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com
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SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) – Court officials in Macedonia say 20 people have been jailed following a probe into antiquity smuggling rings that led to the seizure of more than 4,000 ancient artifacts, some more than 2,000 years old.
The suspects were arrested in June 2010 and sentenced Friday, after being found guilty of illegal excavation and possession and smuggling of antiquities. They’ve each received jail terms ranging from two to seven years.
During a nationwide police investigation, police raided 60 homes and properties in eight towns. The artifacts seized include 3,000 coins mainly from Roman times, 20 marble, bronze, and copper figurines, and 160 pieces of ancient jewelry.
Police said most of the objects had been destined for sale in Greece, Italy and Austria.
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The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall photographed during Taipei’s 2004 Lantern Festival. Photo by Philo Vivero, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
TAIPEI (AFP) – French architects Catherine Mosbach and Philippe Rahm have won an international contest to design a $90 million urban park in central Taiwan, officials on the island said Wednesday.
The duo, in collaboration with Taiwanese architect Ricky Liu, were picked for an “original and forward-looking” design integrating the concept of climate change into the 68-hectare (168-acre) park, said the Taichung city government.
They aim to monitor temperature, humidity, and pollution through computer simulations in order to “micro-adjust” the climate and create a “smart ecology park,” it said in a statement.
The vast park will also include a cultural centre, a tower and a cinema, as well as tennis, basketball and baseball courts, it said.
A total of 58 teams from 22 countries took part in the contest.
BOGOTA (AFP) – A Pablo Picasso etching valued at $65,000 was stolen from a museum in southwestern Colombia, the institution said Tuesday.
The painting, untitled and dated 1930, disappeared Friday afternoon from the wall where it was hanging at the Casa Museo Negret and MIAMP museum in Popayan, museum director Oscar Hernandez said.
Hernandez said that the engraving depicted the Greek god of wine Dionysus with a woman in his arms and was last seen before two foreigners entered the museum.
Popayan authorities offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to recovery of the work.
The engraving was donated to the museum in 2004 by Colombian sculptor Edgar Negret, who was born in Popayan in 1920.
