Sotheby’s Retains Custody of Cambodian Statue

April 5, 2012,
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Ruling against the immediate seizure of a 1,000-year-old Cambodian statue the United States and Cambodian governments say was looted from its temple site, a federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday gave Sotheby’s continued custody of the antiquity and called a conference on the case for April 12.

The judge, George B. Daniels, signed a restraining order directing Sotheby’s not to dispose of the sandstone statue, which the auction house had planned to sell for an unidentified Belgian client for up to $3 million last year, and to make it available for inspection by the Department of Homeland Security, which had sought its forfeiture as stolen property.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, filed a civil complaint on Wednesday against Sotheby’s, alleging that the auction house knew that the statue had been stolen when it offered it for auction on March 24, 2011.

The government then planned to impound the sculpture this week for return to Cambodia.

But Sotheby’s on Thursday asked Judge Daniels to bar the government from seizing the relic. A lawyer for Sotheby’s, Peter G. Neiman, said in court papers that the company’s bid to sell the antiquity on behalf of its owner was legal under its interpretation of American and Cambodian cultural property laws.

He called prosecutors’ arguments for confiscating the statue “tenuous” and filled with “legal and factual holes,” and said the government was not equipped to care for the 500-pound sandstone depiction of a mythological warrior.

In response, Sharon Cohen Levin, an assistant United States attorney, told Judge Daniels that United States customs officials routinely care for precious art and artifacts, and cited law and precedents that she said gave the government the right to seize disputed antiquities.

Sotheby’s has proposed that it keep the statue while the issues of ownership are negotiated. But Ms. Levin wrote that Sotheby’s was “not an appropriate independent third party for the government to entrust with the property,” because the auction house understood that the piece was stolen before putting it up for sale last spring.

In his ruling, Judge Daniels appeared to accept Sotheby’s argument, with some conditions, pending the conference next week.