Legal prices in opposition to the French curator Jean-François Charnier, for having “facilitated the gross sales” of allegedly looted Egyptian antiquities to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, are being dropped following a call of the best French court docket. Nevertheless, the court docket has rejected the enchantment of the previous director of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, upholding his indictment with “complicity in gang fraud”.
Each males have been indicted in 2022 in relation to the Egyptian antiquities trafficking investigation which has implicated a variety of sellers and main artwork establishments together with the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York. The costs in opposition to Martinez and Charnier have been upheld by a chamber of the Paris court docket of enchantment in February.
On Tuesday (14 November), the French excessive court docket determined that correct process had not been adopted when Charnier, a former senior curator of the France Muséums consultancy answerable for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, was positioned in custody in July 2022. The court docket discovered the decide had not been duly knowledgeable by investigators beforehand of the motives for his arrest. His custody and subsequent indictment ought to subsequently have been annulled by the appeals court docket, which can now need to overview the case. Nevertheless, the ruling doesn’t stop the decide from interviewing Charnier once more.
Martinez’s arrest in Could 2022 on prices referring to his function as chairman of the scientific council that supervised Abu Dhabi’s acquisitions despatched shock waves by way of the artwork world. He served as president-director of the Louvre in Paris from 2013 to 2021.
Each males have denied any wrongdoing, saying that doubts over the provenance of the Egyptian antiquities bought to the Louvre Abu Dhabi for a complete of €40m by French supplier Christophe Kunicki have been solely raised in 2019, years after their buy by the Emirati museum.
The antiquities trafficking investigation was launched when the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork needed to return to Egypt a golden sarcophagus it had purchased from Kunicki. The German supplier Serop Simonian, suspected to be the supply of those antiquities, was arrested in Hamburg and transferred to France, the place he was jailed on 15 September on prices of gang fraud and laundering.
