Know-your-client rules are not just bureaucratic boxes to tick. In some art trade transactions they can be the difference between...

Know-your-client rules are not just bureaucratic boxes to tick. In some art trade transactions they can be the difference between sniffing out a fraudster and losing possession of, say, an early Gustave Courbet painting. The London gallery owner Patrick Matthiesen learned this the hard way. He had purchased an 1844 oil painting by Courbet, Mother and Child on a Hammock, at a French auction house in 2015 and was looking to sell it. In 2023, he consigned the painting to the Nicholas Hall Gallery in New York, which specialises in Old Master works, to show it at the Tefaf Maastricht fair of that year, and the painting was listed for sale for $650,000. It did not sell, but the Nicholas Hall Gallery was interested in displaying the picture in New York. That would have been a better plan than what ended up transpiring. On 14 November, the 68-year-old Doyle was arrested by agents from the FBI’s Art Crime Team and charged with one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison term of 20 years. The case is being handled by the Office’s Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit. Sarukhanishvili is also being sought by law enforcement agents. The moral Radcliffe draws from this episode is that “the art world needs a database of people who have defrauded someone, who have not paid their debts or should not be traded with. A database like that would be a major deterrent to these kinds of crimes, getting the art trade closer to the standards of other industries, like banking and insurance.” https://lnkd.in/g55EhuyB