Examination of witnesses (Questions 218
- 239)
TUESDAY 18 APRIL 2000
MR JULIAN
RADCLIFFE, OBE and MS
SARAH JACKSON
Chairman: Thank you very much for coming
to see us. I have seen you at the back of the room listening to
the other session and so we will move straight into questioning
with Mr Wyatt.
Derek Wyatt
218. Good morning. In your evidence to us on
page 10 you say there are 6,000 licences for cultural goods issued
for export every year but in no cases are these referred to you.
How do we rectify that?
(Mr Radcliffe) Where they are under the power of the
Government to suggest to the relevant part of the Civil Service
or the Committee that they should refer to us on at least some
of these items being exported because some of them may be Holocaust
or looted and may be on our database.
219. Is it slightly ironic that the Government
does not refer to you.
(Mr Radcliffe) It certainly is. It is also ironic
that in the police records both at Scotland Yard and elsewhere
in the world there are details of objects which are not sensitive
in themselves (even though the ownership of them may have been
at the time of the theft) which if put on our database would immediately
increase the rate of recovery and intelligence gained.
220. I agree. You then go on to say that you
understand there are significant numbers of items missing from
government collections. I do not know quite how you know that
but let me assume that there are. That also is an appalling situation.
How long do you think that has been going on, 100 years or 200
years?
(Mr Radcliffe) It has certainly been going on for
a long time. We know that there are a lot of items missing and
particularly the Ministry of Defence had an audit and a significant
number of items were missing, either presumed stolen or misplaced.
221. What was the date of that audit?
(Mr Radcliffe) About two years ago.
222. Is it mainly the Ministry of Defence then
or are there other Departments you know of?
(Mr Radcliffe) I am sure there are other departments
although I am not sure they have necessarily come to the floor
to announce the fact.
(Ms Jackson) Principally the MoD and there are some
items missing from museum collections as well which they have
uncovered in internal audit which also are untraceable.
223. We should look at that, Mr Chairman. Why
have you set a figure of £10,000? Is it just because there
are so many stolen items?
(Mr Radcliffe) We have not set a figure of £10,000.
The antiquities dealers set that figure. We are prepared to search
well below that figure. Clearly it is a matter of economics because
we charge for searches. It is also a matter, as quite rightly
said previously, that the lower the value the item the more likely
they are to have been "mass produced" and therefore
the chances of our being able to register them may be lower. But,
for example, though we have an agreement with the International
Association that they will search £10,000 and above, we have
not yet got an agreement with the ADA and we have been talking
for two years about it.
224. What is the ADA?
(Mr Radcliffe) The previous organisation giving evidence.
225. Thank you. If we look at the whole trade—and
we admire what you have done—would it make more sense if
there was a compulsory element to all this so that the homeowner
even at the lower level of an antique clock, or whatever it is,
who said we do not know what it is worth and had to take a policy
out with you or in the insurance policy the insurance company
insisted that it was registered with you?
(Mr Radcliffe) There are two separate ways in which
we can make the whole operation of a central data base more effective.
The first thing is to make certain that all thefts get logged
because that is what is important to the trade in terms of searches.
We, as I said in our evidence, are probably getting less than
20 per cent of the total of thefts logged. The other part is to
make certain that people have good descriptions before the theft
so that when there is a theft they can get it on to the database.
For that we would run a positive database service, ie pre-loss
records often financed through the insurance policy, and we are
in the discussions with the insurance industry to do that.
226. Do you think that is a private thing with
insurance companies or something the Government ought to take
an interest on?
(Mr Radcliffe) My view is that this can probably be
better achieved by a partnership between the two than by the Government
trying to do it themselves. The reason for this is that you need
a very substantial investment in technology. You need the drive
of private enterprise to go out and sell this internationally
and I think we have been reasonably successful in doing that but
we cannot do it as effectively as we would like without encouragement
from the Government and that encouragement must be to the trade
to search not just reluctantly but positively, not just selectively
but as a matter of standard due diligence, and to make the whole
operation as international as possible, which is easier for a
private operation to do than it would be for a government one.
227. On the international side it is clear from
the evidence we have heard when we have been travelling and back
here and the evidence from people like yourselves that there is
a difference of opinion. If there were to be an international
group or international version of you that was bigger and stronger,
where would it reside? In G8? How would it be done? Where would
you go to build this base?
(Mr Radcliffe) We have discussed this with UNESCO
and other agencies of the United Nations, with Interpol, and with
anybody else who would care to talk to us and it is quite clear
to me, and I am Chairman of other similar databases, that trying
to rely on some international governmental body to do this and
raise the very substantial funding required is probably not the
most effective way to go. You could say that I have a vested interest
obviously in furthering the paddling of our own canoe, and that
is true, but I think it is fair to say that when we started in
1990 very few people thought that we would achieve the position
we have already achieved in our first ten years and I would expect
in the next ten years, even if governments were not tremendously
active in supporting us, we will achieve the same position as
has been achieved in the secondhand car market. If somebody does
not check a secondhand car against the register as to whether
it has a hire purchase commitment or is stolen they will go to
jail. Police use that as prima facie evidence of trading
in stolen goods. There is absolutely no reason why that should
not be done now in the art and antiques world. The trading standards
and the law is there and could be used, it is just that nobody
has really made the effort to apply it.
Mr Fearn
228. You refer in your evidence to links between
the trade in stolen art and organised crime. Do you think the
police and the art trade in this country are sufficiently aware
of all this? What makes you say that anyway?
(Mr Radcliffe) We have had a number of cases in which
we have been involved with the police in helping with recoveries
and the recoveries have led to intelligence showing that there
are South American narcotics gangs operating across Eastern Europe,
and that evidence is well known to Scotland Yard. It may not be
quite so well known to the art trade but certainly there has been
some publicity about it. You do not want to say, therefore, that
all trade in stolen art and antiques is actually part of an international
Maffia, well organised criminal network, a lot of it is done by
relatively small time criminals.
229. What particular research do you carry out
before an item goes on to the Register?
(Mr Radcliffe) Before an item goes on to the Register
we check with the person registering it as stolen that he has
reported it to the police and there is a crime reference number
to make certain that items are not being put on which are just
matters of civil dispute. Very often we check, or always check
whether there is an insurance company involvement which may be
a further substantiation of the fact that an item is stolen.
230. Turning to the Second World War, you are
trying to have a comprehensive database now of items which were
looted during that period. How many works of art are there on
that Register?
(Ms Jackson) We have now got 10,000 items on a Register.
The World War 2 database is divided into items stolen from victims
of the Holocaust, then items taken by Soviet trophy brigades,
by allied troops and so on. 7,000 of those items are falling into
that second category, the first 3,000 will be classified Holocaust
claims. Typically there are paintings, that is certainly the largest
category of item we have on the database, there are a number of
coin collections, weapons, furniture, silver and so on. These
items are registered on our database free of charge and are included
then in the searching routine that we undertake for the art trade
and the auction houses. All the work we do for claimants on those
objects is on a pro bono basis.
231. Are you called to give evidence then on
a case which is brought to say an article does belong to a Jewish
family, say? Do you enter into that at all or do you just provide
the Register?
(Ms Jackson) Obviously one has to do a certain amount
of due diligence checking ourselves before we accept a claim on
to the database. It is no good somebody saying "Our family
had a picture of a Renoir in our home in Leipzig" anybody
could say that. Obviously we have to try and get as much documentation
as possible, obviously given the length of time which has elapsed
since the period, the circumstances in which the items were taken,
that is not going to be as comprehensive as we would like it.
It is possible to get documents from archives where those archives
are accessible. Also, we undertake a lot of art historical research
for claimants, researching with a catalogue, resumes on artists
with experts and so on, to identify the items and get them into
a state where we believe they could be registered on behalf of
the claimant.
(Mr Radcliffe) Can I just add to that. We try to make
certain, also, that we just do not dump problems on the art trade
or anybody else. It is not very helpful to say to somebody who
is searching an item "By the way, that is believed to be
Holocaust stolen". It is often a grey area, a lot of work
needs to be done and it is often not very helpful to a claimant
to say "Over to you, we believe this is now sitting in a
gallery in Moscow". We try to make certain that there is
as much possibility for the parties to resolve the case as possible.
232. In that respect, you are associated with
the British police or are you associated with the police abroad
as well?
(Mr Radcliffe) Generally we work very closely with
the police. The Holocaust items tend not to have great involvement
of police forces, they tend to be more of a civil, moral and legal
matter than it is a police matter. All our operations around the
world, particularly when we are negotiating to recover items,
are only carried out with police permission. So, for example,
last year we got back a £16 million Cezanne and we worked
with the police in three different countries, wrote the public
policy principles to make certain we were not going to make any
payment in a way which would not be compatible, we did not make
any payment at all, in fact. All that sort of negotiation is carried
out in close conjunction with the police.
233. I admire the work. How many items have
disappeared from the Register and how many were taken off? What
success have you had?
(Mr Radcliffe) The Register is about 100,000 uniquely
describable individual items which have been stolen. We have recovered
several hundred items on the database, over 600 items of that
100,000 have been recovered and then several thousand items, not
uniquely describable, which were associated with them and by proof
of association we could prove were stolen at the same time or
through one item which was unique we have recovered hundreds of
other items which might not have been logged with us but were
part of the same fences operation or same burglary operations.
Ms Ward
234. You have mentioned 100,000 stolen items
so I assume then your Register does not include illegally exported
items?
(Mr Radcliffe) There are three bits; stolen, illegally
exported and illegally excavated which usually, also, will be
illegally exported. Our role is slightly different in all three.
In illegally exported, for example, we are setting up the database
now for the London art market of all items which are allowed to
be traded within China and are marked as such in catalogues in
China which should not be exported. We can run a database of that
and if those items turn up in the West we can warn the art trade
that they have been illegally exported. Clearly items that have
been illegally excavated nobody has any record of and our role
in that is more limited because it is clear that an item has been
dug out of the ground in the middle of the night and nobody will
have any record of it.
(Ms Jackson) Having said that, we do have a number
of registrations from ICOM—the International Council of
Museums. They focused on three distinct areas which included pre-Columbian
works of art and also African works of art that were illicitly
dug up out of the ground. It registered them in publications and
those have been circulated internationally and have been registered
with us. At present those are illegally excavated and exported.
235. Where does a large amount of your information
come from? Who provides the information that X object has been
stolen?
(Mr Radcliffe) The insurance industry provide the
biggest sector of our notifications.
236. Worldwide?
(Mr Radcliffe) Worldwide. The police provide a large
part of it and private individuals who are uninsured provide a
large part of it. Things stolen from the art trade itself of course
tend to come in through the insurance industry.
(Ms Jackson) I should say also we have the Interpol
records dating back to the 1970s.
237. Would you accept that it is much easier
for the large auction houses or the ten or 12 biggest dealers
to be able to check your register and to be part of that process
than it is for the hundreds or thousands of smaller dealers to
be able to get involved?
(Mr Radcliffe) I do not think that is correct, actually.
We do have some very small dealers who are very careful about
searching. Clearly at the lower end of the market the descriptions
are less good and that becomes more difficult, therefore, to search.
In principle, there is no reason why a small dealer should not
subscribe to us and search items by sending in a fax, a photograph
or getting on the telephone, no reason at all.
238. The issue is that they are not required
to do it, is that right?
(Mr Radcliffe) Nobody is required to.
239. On that basis you would say that they should
be required in some way or another to have to subscribe to a service,
whether it is your's or a competitor's, somebody else's, some
service that would ensure that they have a duty to check goods
before they are bought?
(Mr Radcliffe) If you take secondhand motor cars,
and I use this as an example, I got the company that runs the
database to be one of our shareholders on day one because I could
see the similarity and the parallel. In the secondhand motor cars
nobody produced specific legislation directed at motor cars, it
was a private initiative to set up a database of hire purchase
and stolen cars in conjunction with the police but actually it
was a private database. Then it was merely the application of
the current law which made certain that all motor car dealers
started searching because the police—and of course it is
an easier area because it is alpha numeric—will go very
hard on any secondhand car dealer who has not got a search certificate
for the car. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot achieve
the same thing in the art trade.
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