Dealer Detained in Paris on Suspicion of Selling Looted Artifacts to Met, Louvre Abu Dhabi
German-Lebanese seller Roben Dib, who’s suspected by US and French officers to been closely concerned within the sale of looted objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, was collared in Hamburg final week, The Art Newspaper reviews. Through a European arrest warrant, Dib was summarily shipped off to France, the place he stays in custody, awaiting trial in a Paris courtroom on costs of gang fraud and cash laundering.
Dib is alleged to be related to French seller and Mediterranean archaeology knowledgeable Christophe Kunicki who, together with his husband, Richard Semper, was in 2020 detained in Paris and charged with working a widespread trafficking enterprise involving looted antiquities from Egypt and the Center East. Authorities started trying into Kunicki’s doings after he offered a golden sarcophagus to the Met for €3.5 million ($3.85 million). The National Law Review reported on the time of Kunicki’s arrest that the Met, which had not correctly reviewed the article’s possession historical past on receiving it, had later realized the merchandise’s provenance had been solid and that it had been nicked throughout the Arab Spring rebellion of 2011. The Met issued an apology and returned the sarcophagus to Egypt. The legal investigation into Kunicki, undertaken by the Manhattan district lawyer’s workplace, revealed that he had obtained the article from Dib and a pair of aged brothers residing in California, Simon and Serop Simonian. The DA’s workplace moreover seized a 2,600-year-old Egyptian stele certain for the artwork honest Tefaf New York, presupposed to have been offered illegally by Dib and the Simonian brothers to a French gallery. The merchandise was repatriated and the gallery, just like the Met, vowed to sue these concerned.
Dib is moreover suspected of getting offered 5 essential Egyptian works—amongst them a Fayum portrait and yet one more golden sarcophagus—to the Louvre Abhu Dhabi for a complete of €50 million. The seller has denied that he got here by the gadgets illegally, asserting that he obtained them from the late Simon Simonian, who labored as a seller in Cairo from 1969 to 1984, and that each one the artefacts have been attended by had legit export paperwork courting to that point.
