The investigation of justice on a vast traffic of antiquities looted in the Middle East is interested in the role of the former president and director of the Louvre museum, Jean-Luc Martinez. He was charged on Wednesday with money laundering and complicity in organized fraud.
At the head of the largest museum in the world for eight years, Jean-Luc Martinez was placed in police custody on Monday at the premises of the Central Office for the Fight against Trafficking in Cultural Property, according to a source familiar with the matter.
He was indicted late Wednesday afternoon for “complicity in fraud in an organized gang and laundering by false facilitation of the origin of property from a crime or misdemeanor”, said Thursday a judicial source. He was placed under judicial supervision.
Mr. Martinez, 58, “contests with the greatest firmness his questioning in this case”, reacted to AFP his lawyers Me Jacqueline Laffont and Me François Artuphel. “He reserves his statements for the time being for the courts and has no doubt that his good faith will be established,” they added.
The former head of the Louvre from 2013 to the summer of 2021 is now ambassador for international cooperation in the field of heritage.
Two Egyptologists freed
Two eminent French Egyptologists, who had also been taken into custody on Monday, have meanwhile been released without prosecution at this stage, the judicial source said.
According to the French weekly Le Canard enchaîné, which had announced the police custody, the investigators are trying to find out if Mr. Martinez would have “closed his eyes” to false certificates of origin of five pieces of Egyptian antiquity acquired “for several tens of millions of euros” by the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the branch of the Parisian museum in the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Among these pieces is a pink granite stele engraved with the name of King Tutankhamun, “an exceptional object”, according to Egyptologist Marc Gabolde quoted by the French daily Le Monde.
It was he who alerted the other two Egyptologists to the dubious provenance of the stele, in a note in early 2019, according to the newspaper. The two specialists would then have transmitted the document to Mr. Martinez. Asked by AFP, the management of the Louvre did not wish to react.
Hundreds of looted coins
A preliminary investigation into suspicions of trafficking in antiquities from the Near and Middle East was discreetly opened in July 2018 by the Paris prosecutor’s office.
Since February 2020, an investigating judge has been in charge of an open judicial investigation for concealment of theft in an organized gang, criminal association, money laundering and fraud in an organized gang, forgery and use of forgery as well as omission of mention by the seller on the register of movable objects.
This traffic would concern hundreds of pieces and would involve several tens of millions of euros, according to sources close at the time. The facts had been revealed during a resounding crackdown in the hushed environment of the Parisian art market and antique dealers in June 2020.
An expert in Mediterranean archaeology, Christophe Kunicki, and her husband Richard Semper, merchant, had been charged and placed under judicial supervision. These two respected figures in the world of antiquities in the French capital are suspected of having “laundered” archaeological objects looted in several countries plagued by instability since the beginning of the 2010s: Egypt, Libya, Yemen or Syria.
Last March, Roben Dib, owner of a gallery in Hamburg (Germany), was also indicted and remanded in custody.
The Central Office for the Fight against Trafficking in Cultural Property is seeking to determine the conditions for the acquisition by the Louvre Abu Dhabi, through this German-Lebanese gallery owner, of the five antiquities illegally taken out of Egypt, according to the Chained duck.
The names of Mr. Kunicki and Mr. Semper had already been cited in the case of the sarcophagus of the priest Nedjemankh, sold to the “Met” in New York in 2017 for 3.5 million euros by Mr. Kunicki.
An investigation established that the object had been stolen in 2011, the year of the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak. This sarcophagus was finally solemnly returned to Egypt in 2019.
This article has been published automatically. Sources: ats / afp