Jean-Luc Martinez is suspected of participating in the smuggling of stolen art worth millions of dollars, some of which is believed to have ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The investigation into the possible trafficking of large quantities of Middle Eastern antiques took a dramatic turn earlier this week in Paris, when Jean-Luc Martinez, the former director of the Louvre, was arrested by French police on Monday morning.
According to a source close to the investigation, Martinez, the head of the Louvre’s Egyptian department, Vincent Rondot, and Olivier Perdu, a notable Egyptologist, were interviewed by the French agency against art trafficking (OCBC). On Tuesday night, Perdu was released without charge. He said that he was only questioned because the Revue d’Egyptologie, which he runs for the French Egyptologists’ Society, “wrote an academic paper in 2019 on the historical relevance of a stele sold to the Louvre Abu Dhabi.” “I was completely cleared of any wrongdoing,” he asserts.
Martinez was still being detained at the time this article was written, despite the fact that he had not been charged with any crime. An official government source confirmed the facts, but the Louvre Museum and the government would not reply until they are made public. Martinez has previously said that he is not guilty of any wrongdoing.
The news follows the arrest in Paris of Roben Dib, a German-Lebanese dealer who has been detained since March on suspicion of gang fraud and money laundering. When interrogated in Hamburg two years ago, he denied all allegations of art trafficking.
French judge Jean-Michel Gentil accused Parisian expert and trader Christophe Kunicki with criminal conspiracy, gang fraud, and money laundering in June 2020. At the time, the OCBC raided the Paris offices of the French agency for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, confiscating documents. According to the satirical newspaper Canard enchaîné, French investigators want to go to New York to exchange intelligence with Matthew Bogdanos, the director of the District Attorney’s office’s trafficking antiquities division, who has been investigating a trafficking ring since 2013.
Kunicki, who previously denied any wrongdoing when questioned by The Art Newspaper, sold a golden casket to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for €3.5 million in 2017, after which the District Attorney seized it and returned it to Egypt. According to a source close to the investigation, criminal investigations in France and the United States have now concentrated on nine additional objects purchased from Kunicki and Dib for more than €50 million by the Metropolitan and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The New York Museum’s representative declined to comment on the specifics, but did say that “employees were duped by this criminal plot, and the museum has been totally helpful throughout this probe and will continue to do so.”
None of these artifacts were purchased by the Louvre Museum in Paris. However, from the project’s beginning in 2007, all acquisitions made by the Emirati museum with the support of French specialists have had to be approved by a joint committee co-chaired by the Louvre’s director. Martinez was the director of the Louvre from 2013 until 2021. Since then, he has been designated as a special ambassador for international cultural heritage cooperation, and he is now doing research on restitutions to African countries.
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