Examination of witnesses (Questions 260
- 282)
TUESDAY 18 APRIL 2000
MR ANTHONY
BROWNE, MR
ANTHONY MAIR,
MS RENA
MOULOPOULOS, MR
CHARLES HILL
and SIR THOMAS
LIGHTON
260. I am baffled by that reply. If the Italians
or any other country go to the trouble of passing a law forbidding
the export of certain objects ought we not, as part of the civilised
community, co-operate with them by saying if there is a violation
of their laws then we ought to make it an offence for those who
in this country act as a consequence of violation of those laws?
(Mr Mair) I think as a lawyer my response to that
would be that if the law is in violation of the Treaty, which
overrides domestic law, it would be incorrect to introduce the
criminal sanction in this country which compounds the violation.
261. Certainly I accept that any law which overrode
a Treaty ought not to prevail, but I still think there is an interesting
principle to be investigated there.
(Mr Browne) Can I add one thing to that. I think you
say certain objects, where the difficulty arises is actually identifying
the objects. If export regulations were in place, as my colleague
here suggested, to protect national treasures, to protect specific
objects, there could be a database of them, it would be very easy
for all of us to consult that, it would be very, very easy indeed.
The problem is that it is not, it goes much further than that.
It is very vague in certain cases and it is extremely difficult
to tell. What we are saying—and I entirely endorse your
comments about Conventions—is if we could throw our weight
behind developing this database idea so the trade and the auction
houses can be absolutely as sure as anybody can be that they are
not handling these things, they do not want to handle them, then
we would go a very long way to providing a practical solution
to this problem.
262. Can you tell me, any of you, lady or gentlemen,
what you believe, if you do believe, would specifically be gained
by this country ratifying the UNESCO and UNIDROIT Conventions?
(Mr Browne) Specifically be gained?
263. Yes. In terms of dealing with this trade
which is the subject of this inquiry.
(Mr Browne) My view is not a very great deal would
be gained unless it is accompanied by these practical measures.
I think we are putting the cart before the horse. We have to have
the practical measures that we can check first and then the Conventions
would be more welcome, no doubt. You know more about the details
of the Convention than I do but that would be my view.
264. We can all say God is love and signing
up to these Conventions is the equivalent. What are the practical
consequences of saying God is love unless we behave in a Godly
fashion?
(Mr Browne) Precisely. If I understand the line of
what you are suggesting—
265. I think you do. Pretty heavy handed.
(Mr Browne) I think the point is that it comes back
to the fact that there is a vast legitimate trade which has no
interest in dealing in these objects. There is a huge trade out
there of things that people perfectly legitimately can buy and
sell. What we are trying to do is to isolate the illicit market
and these problems in a practical way which we can be sure we
are doing. That is really where we are coming from in all this.
Derek Wyatt
266. Can I just turn your attention to appendix
2 which you sent us. Forgive my ignorance but you say that "The
implications for the UK if the UNESCO Convention were to be ratified..."
includes quite a lot of things, but perhaps you could explain
why this is such a bad thing: "The establishment of a national
inventory of cultural property, the export of which would constitute
an appreciable impoverishment of national cultural heritage".
I do not understand that, why is that not a good idea?
(Mr Browne) We think it is a good idea but it would
imply doing that, that is what we are saying. This is one of the
consequences. The point is we think it is a good idea to do that.
267. We have not done it.
(Mr Browne) We have got the Art Loss Register, as
we said.
268. Yes, but that is pretty small beer.
(Mr Browne) I am not sure the Art Loss Register would
say so. It is all there is at the moment.
269. Sure.
(Mr Browne) Also, we co-operate closely with the police.
I do not know whether Charles Hill, who was in charge of the Art
and Antique Squad at Scotland Yard, with whom we have always co-operated,
wants to make a few points in relation to that.
(Mr Hill) It is the enforcement issue, as the Chairman
was speaking about a moment ago.
270. I cannot hear you.
(Mr Hill) If you ratify these things, who on earth
is going to enforce it? You have been to the Yard and met the
officers there involved, all good men, not very many of them.
NCIS, the same. It is impractical.
Chairman: Perhaps I should add in consequence
of what Mr Wyatt has just said, the acoustics in this room really
are terrible.
Derek Wyatt
271. You say "The establishment of a mechanism
for publicly recording the disappearance of items of cultural
property". That seems to be a good idea to me. If you are
not prepared to do anything and we are not prepared to sign up
as a Government there is a black hole here, let us just let it
be, be jolly and friendly and who cares, let us carry on. Have
another beer.
(Mr Browne) We are going quite a long way. The point
is we did set up the Art Loss Register.
272. That was 1990. What initiatives since then?
(Mr Browne) As you heard earlier, it has developed
greatly but we think it needs probably more resources. As Charles
Hill said, we need to have more resources devoted to the police
to enforce these things. That is the problem. Of course technology
moves on to make it easier to have an international database to
record all these things undoubtedly.
(Ms Moulopoulos) If I could jump in. The UNIDROIT/UNESCO
Conventions have been discussed, litigated, circulated for some
30 years at this point. They are by everyone's admission unsatisfactory
documents for the extreme archaeologist and for the extreme art
trader. There is a point of saying "What is exactly the problem
that has to be solved". If one takes on board, which I think
we all do, that it is the preservation of world heritage, the
preservation of archaeological sites, the loss, the decrease or
elimination or destruction of archaeological sites and/or looting,
it would seem that the focus should be not on the details and
pros and cons of these specific documents but given the 21st century,
the advance of technology, the advance of European Unionism as
a governmental whole, the focus should be on how can we create
incentives to preserve archaeological sites, to have archaeologists
have the funding that they need, to have the police have the special
training and education they need which is specialised in the antique
market to identify and to protect the sites. What ways can we
encourage immediate reporting, even before the scholarly research
has been done of even part of the find, because immediately it
is on the Internet people will know those particular new kinds
of objects that have been found and dug up cannot be traded? It
may be time after these 30 years, and I think it is probably fair
to say they have not been effective, these Treaties. Even in the
United States where UNESCO was adopted in 1970, in 1983 we had
implementing legislation which is dramatically more narrow than
the UNESCO Treaty but it has been in existence for some 17 years
and there have been only eight countries that have sought that
type of protection under the legal framework. It would seem maybe
it is time to shift from the Treaties and the Conventions which
seem to be having limited effect in truly solving the problem
of preserving archaeological sites, to trying to get task forces,
inter-governmental agencies, private funding, on protecting the
archaeological site and heritage. If those were protected you
would eliminate the stolen properties, you would eliminate the
illegal exports or decrease them.
273. I would not like to go down that too much
because we have been to the Parthenon in Greece and the Greek
Government is spending a million pounds a year renovating it and
it could be hundreds of years before it is finished. I wonder
whether a national government would welcome intervention in terms
of finance or actually involvement from other archaeologists?
I think that would be a very difficult area. I do not want to
go on to that. Certainly in our visits, whatever people have said
this morning, it was said London was the centre of the illicit
art trade and you say it is not. Yet that is what we are being
told and that is the evidence we saw and were given. Do you say
that is rubbish?
(Mr Browne) We are very surprised to hear this. We
represent the legitimate art market which turns over a huge amount
of things without any problem at all, for the most part. Where
is this art market? One is aware of major thefts but they do not
come on the market. For example, the Oudry from Houghton or the
Titian from Longleat, they do not appear on the market, we never
see them. Of course they are part of the statistics of losses
but they never appear because they are unsaleable.
Chairman
274. They are notorious, are they not? They
are very high profile and notorious but there must be thousands
of objects which are less easily recognised.
(Mr Browne) Chairman, that is why we are suggesting
a database because actually it spreads the virtue of that down
the scale tremendously. Of course those are notorious but if you
can put more things on the database then one would have to put
greater access to those as well. I have to say, it will not surprise
you for me to say that I do not know very much about the illicit
art market but Charles has had quite a bit of experience of it
from the police point of view.
(Mr Hill) It is not true that London is the centre,
it is true that London is a centre of the stolen art market. Sadly
it is not just the subject that is liable to exaggeration, it
is prone to exaggeration of how much is stolen and how much appears
in London and what we should do about it in terms of umpteen hundreds
of police officers to address the matter. London has a problem
with stolen art, without doubt. The police periodically address
the problems and then let them fade. You have recently been there,
they have said to you that they want to come back to the matter
but they need more money to do it. That is great, that is good.
They probably exaggerated, not by any means deliberately lying
to you, the scope of the problem. This is a bastion of exaggeration
itself, this House. The fact is that people do up the ante a bit
to make the case and I am afraid the ante was upped. It is unlikely
to be £500 million worth of stolen art that flows through
London and the UK a year, it is more likely to be £50 million,
a tenth of it. The problem is the information I believe you have
been given has been prone to exaggeration.
Derek Wyatt
275. The information is from both sets of police
forces, in Italy and here, and it confirms that it is the second
largest after drugs, in fact perhaps connected with drugs. You
are saying absolute rubbish.
(Mr Hill) No, I am not saying that. Please do not
misunderstand me. What I am saying is, yes, there is a connection
with drugs. There are episodes, the most notorious one I have
been involved in was the man in Dublin, Cahill, he was involved
in the drugs trade and he stole an enormous amount of works of
art, a Vermeer, a Goya, things you could not possibly sell anywhere.
He stole a whole variety of things from heavy plant to paintings,
antiques, what have you, to fund his drugs enterprises. Before
he was shot dead by the IRA he wanted to be the main importer
of cocaine and heroin in Ireland, well, in the British Isles not
just Ireland. People like that exist and they go for these big
pictures and they go for lesser known works as well to fund their
activities, that is certainly true. By and large the things which
get stolen are by burglars who see something, steal it and knock
it out at Newark fair, some shady art dealer type person, not
the people involved in BAMF. When it comes to London itself certainly
there have been problems with antiquities. You will all recall
Tokley-Parry went to prison for six years who really looted the
tombs in Saqqara. His behaviour was outrageous and he had to pay
the consequences for it. To say that the antiquities market is
rife with people like Tokley-Parry and bent dealers here and everywhere
else, to say that the picture market is bent because Peter Watson
has done a job on television, propping up a Milan dealer to come
to Sotheby's to sell a picture that should not have been exported,
those are aspects of the exaggeration of the problem. The problem
is severe, it needs to be dealt with in a sensible way. The practical
solutions that Anthony and the rest of the art market are proposing,
and Julian Radcliffe was speaking about, those are the things
we should do. It is certainly not true to say that the problem
is out of control. I think that the Carabinieri you spoke to,
and did you go to Paris as well?
Derek Wyatt: Athens.
Chairman
276. It may not be out of control. Let us derive
two things. First of all, when we visited your successors at New
Scotland Yard they told us that if the money was available they
would multiply by ten the number of people they had specifically
working on this. Secondly, AXA Nordstern has gone to the trouble
of hiring you with all your qualifications as an adviser. Presumably
if it was not a problem of sufficient dimensions they would not
have gone to the trouble of hiring you.
(Mr Hill) Yes, we are also the insurers of the Oudry
and Titian and both Lord Bath and Lord Cholmondeley would like
their pictures back. I think that is the part of the reason.
Derek Wyatt
277. If we do not do anything this just goes
on. I am a bit confused really about where the initiatives are,
whether it is the Government that should be doing more—
(Mr Hill) Both.
278. —or whether you are reluctant for
us to get involved because you are nervous of us because you do
not want us to meddle. You want to keep this to yourself.
(Mr Hill) No, we have a brilliant chance now for a
joint enterprise and an initiative from both the public and private
sector to do something. I think this whole issue of the database
is the one that is prime. It is a prime opportunity to put together
something with both the police, Customs and Excise, the National
Criminal Intelligence Service and the private sector, various
insurers, the big auction houses, Christie's and Sotheby's, it
is possible for us to do something constructive now. It is the
practical solutions that have been suggested and I am here to
support.
Ms Ward
279. You have criticised to some extent the
UNESCO Convention, do you think that if it was really inappropriate,
many of the terms that are part of that Convention, that France
and the United States would have signed?
(Mr Browne) Rena will possibly explain the extent
to which the Americans have implemented it because I think it
is important to realise they have not implemented all aspects
of it.
(Ms Moulopoulos) Yes. In essence the US after 12 years
of deliberation came up with a fairly stringent test, as Antony
Mair said, that if a foreign government is able to make a request
and submission to a cultural property committee within the US
that there is a serious situation of pillage, there are several
tests under different situations which I would be happy to submit
a short submission to give you details of. Part of the tests are
there has to be a serious situation of pillage of cultural identity
of property in jeopardy. There is required to be a multi-national
response before any import controls can go into place in that.
A big push within the United States was there is no point in the
US imposing restrictions if the other countries are not because
the market will simply shift from one location to another and
the problem will not be solved. The multi-national response has
to be there. The US Government can impose temporary import restrictions
that are prospective for a certain country. Cambodia has sought
import restrictions which went into effect in December 1999, so
you can only import Cambodian antiquities into the US if you can
show either a Cambodian export licence or that the property was
outside Cambodia prior to December 1999. It is a complicated process.
The US Government was loath to begin interpreting and enforcing
and policing the export control laws of foreign countries that
are poorly understood, poorly enforced. Sotheby's has created
a database of export control laws of 70 countries around the world
from which it is possible to get property. It has cost hundreds
of thousands of dollars because the laws are inconsistent. We
are back and forth constantly trying to understand what is the
law at any given time, what are the requirements. It is not an
area like the financial securities market which is heavily litigated
with lots of rulings and opinions. I think certainly the trade
and government felt to get into the business of trying to understand
and enforce and police the export control laws of foreign countries
which are complicated, often inconsistent, not enforced domestically,
and often have a fundamentally different jurisprudence, was not
the appropriate method to pursue.
280. Is there not a conflict in your position
which says that there are countries which hold export laws which
are unreasonable in your view but you want them enforced? You
are arguing on the one hand that you want to see a much stronger
position from those countries in enforcing that—
(Mr Browne) No, I can see what you are getting at
but we exist in the world as it is, not how we might like to see
it. If we think these laws are absurd and unenforceable, well,
you know, there is not much we can do about it, we just have to
try and live with them as Rena was saying. I think the difficulty
is that too often all the sort of odium that gets heaped on the
art market in the UK really comes from the philosophy of shoot
the messenger. They are not really addressing what they could
do about the problems. I can give you some examples. I was quite
involved in the 1993 European Directive on Restitution. There
were many years of discussion actually on this, as some of you
will know, and it ended up with a Directive that everybody could
live with. It was implemented very rapidly here in this country.
I think it took something like six or seven years for the Italian
Government to get around to actually putting it into being themselves.
It is all very well trying to attack it from saying there is this
huge illicit art market in London, we must do something about
it, I think it is very important that the problems are addressed
by people who are complaining about it. It is not really enough,
with respect to the Italian Carabinieri, to say there is this
vast market like the drugs market in London, without giving you
the statistics, the details. Detail is what we need. I have never
seen this. One hears this, but the statistics just do not seem
to be available.
281. Can I ask you also about the requirement
for due diligence? Do you think that the standard for due diligence
for auction houses and art dealers is higher for those larger
organisations that we have heard about this morning than it is
for the smaller dealer? What do you think that standard of due
diligence actually is?
(Mr Browne) I think that what we want to do is to
make it as easy as possible for people to pursue due diligence.
That is why, I am sorry, we keep on coming back to this issue
of the database. If someone walks into whether it is a large or
a small dealer, if he can actually check immediately whether the
person offering it to him has proper title to it, that is a really
good way of testing due diligence. At the moment, as you have
heard from the Art Loss Register, major auction houses regularly
have their catalogues gone over by the Art Loss Register. I noticed
the other day, incidentally, that the biggest picture fair in
Europe, which is the Maastricht Fair organised by the European
Fine Art Foundation, asked the Art Loss Register to check due
diligence on all the things there. So it is happening, but that
is why we need this database. I am sorry, all roads lead back
to that.
(Sir Thomas Lighton) Can I add one thing to that,
which is that the database is certainly extremely important, and
to have as accurate and complete a database as possible, but that
is really only one part of due diligence, and that is the easy
part. All the auction houses and major dealers invest a lot of
money in research going way back. Obviously this has come up recently
because of the looted art problems. There is an immense amount
of effort spent on research into the background of these objects.
Any member of this Committee is very welcome to visit my gallery
and see how we deal with this. A lot of time is spent on it.
282. Do you think there is a concentration inevitably
on the Register, as we have heard this morning and from what we
have heard in the past, but from what you are saying that is not
it, and just using the Register is not the end of the story?
(Mr Browne) Yes. We regularly liaise with the police,
we regularly consult published material, exhibition catalogues,
catalogue raisonnes and so on. That is all part and parcel of
the research which goes on. It is in our interest to do that,
not just for establishing due diligence, but when you are selling
something of great value then clearly the greatest amount of information
you can produce in terms of how much has been exhibited and so
on is an important part of that.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
for completing an extremely interesting morning.
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