Two Convicted in Hamburg Court of Selling Looted Egyptian Antiquities

Two people were convicted in a Hamburg court on Monday of money laundering in a case whose details closely match those of the two children of Serop Simonian, the German art dealer and alleged leader of an Egyptian antiquities trafficking ring that sold items to museums including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The conviction was reported by Arab News, which did not mention the names of the convicted parties or the French museum in the United Arab Emirates. The court ordered the convicted parties to turn over €32 million ($37 million) and pay fines of more than €90,000 ($105,000). The descriptions of artworks and the dollar amounts for which they sold and in the Hamburg case match those of the Simonian investigation. Also charged in that investigation, along with Simonian, is Roben Dib, a German-Lebanese dealer, who was arrested in 2022. The same circle of dealers also sold artworks to the Metropolitan Museum, where the New York District Attorney’s Office seized five antiquities valued collectively at more than $3 million in 2022; those included a gold sarcophagus. Former Louvre president and director Jean-Luc Martinez was indicted a week before that seizure. The Louvre would then announced that it was petitioning to join the criminal investigation as a civil party. In 2020, Hamburg police raided Serop Simonian’s home and his Dionysos gallery; Dib was the manager of the gallery. Simonian and Dib have maintained that their operation is legal and that most of the antiquities in their stock were acquired from Egyptian dealers by Serop’s late brothers, Simon and Hagop, and exported from Egypt in the 1970s, when such operations were still legal. The case led in 2022 to investigations of four German museums that in some cases unwittingly acted as intermediaries for sales between the dealers and art museums worldwide. Serop Simonian was arrested in Germany and transferred to France in 2023. The Hamburg Regional Court, where the siblings were convicted, did not immediately respond to a request for further information from ARTnews. The Hamburg prosecutor, in an email to ARTnews, identified one defendant as S., saying that person was charged on one count of receiving stolen goods and two counts of fraud. Another defendant, referred to as Sc., was charged with money laundering. S., along with suspects named as Si. and D., was alleged to have conspired, beginning as early as 2013, to acquire looted Egyptian antiquities and sell them while concealing their origins. They were accused of purchasing the burial complex of Princess Henuttawy, which consisted of several nested sarcophagi, and transporting it to Germany though it was rightly the property of the Egyptian state. They then allegedly sold it, with the help of a French antiquities dealer, to a museum in the United Arab Emirates, says the prosecutor, for €4.5 million ($5.3 million), using a forged Egyptian export permit to mask its origins. They were also accused of selling an ancient bust of Cleopatra, which Si. had possessed for years, to a museum in the UAE for €35 million ($40.9 million). Again with the help of the antiquities dealer, they falsely asserted that the bust belonged to S. In December 2016, Si. and D. sold a stele of Tutankhamun to a UAE museum for €8.5 million ($9.9 million), again deceiving the buyer about the artifact’s origins. Part of the payment was transferred in 2017 to the defendant Sc.