Sotheby’s Accused of Deceit in Sale of Khmer Statue

U.S. Attorney's Office, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Khmer statue that prosecutors say was stolen from a temple. 

By TOM MASHBERG and RALPH BLUMENTHAL
The New York Times
Published: November 13, 2012 

Federal prosecutors trying to seize a multimillion-dollar 10th-century Cambodian statue from Sotheby’s have accused the auctioneers of colluding with the item’s owner to hide information that it was stolen from a temple in 1972, according to papers filed in United States District Court in Manhattan. Prosecutors say that in 2010, when the statue was being imported into the United States, the owner submitted an inaccurate affidavit to American customs officials, at Sotheby’s request, stating the statue was “not cultural property” belonging to a religious site.

The government contended in its filing on Friday that both parties knew the statue, a mythic Hindu warrior known as Duryodhanna, valued at up to $3 million, was stolen when they agreed to ship it from Belgium to New York. The government says it can prove that the statue in fact came from a Khmer Dynasty temple, Prasat Chen, part of a vast and ancient complex called Koh Ker.

Sotheby’s on Tuesday denied the allegations, saying the government is straining to bolster a thin case by picking selectively through the evidence provided by the auctioneers.

The United States attorney’s office is trying “to tar Sotheby’s with a hodgepodge of other allegations designed to create the misimpression that Sotheby’s acted deceptively in selling the statue,” the auction house said in a statement. “That is simply not true.”

At the heart of the case are the questions of when the statue left Cambodia and whether Cambodian laws and international accords in effect at that time would have barred the item’s removal.

The government has accused Sotheby’s of providing “inaccurate information to potential buyers, to Cambodia and to the United States,” and lists both civil and criminal penalties. Sotheby’s has said the statue’s removal from Cambodia cannot be dated with certainty given the centuries of looting after the fall of the Khmer kingdom in the 15th century.

“The original complaint relied on a series of hopelessly ambiguous French colonial decrees,” Sotheby’s said in a statement. (Cambodia was a French protectorate until 1953.) “There is no clear and unambiguous law that would have given purchasers fair notice that the modern state of Cambodia claims ownership of everything a long-defunct regime made and then abandoned 50 generations ago.”

In September, a federal judge expressed skepticism about the government’s case, saying that Cambodia did not have “clear ownership established by clear and unambiguous language.”

The sculpture is a hulking 500-pound Khmer masterpiece that was set to be auctioned in March 2011 but withdrawn after Cambodia objected and asked for its return. Cambodia is also seeking the return of a companion piece, of a warrior called Bhima, that is on display at the Norton Simon Museum in California. Cambodia has identified the two massive pedestals where the statues once stood because their feet match the statues, which were broken off at the ankles.

Federal investigators have said the Sotheby’s statue was among thousands pillaged during civil war in Cambodia in the 1970s and that Cambodian witnesses recall seeing it in place in that era. In its amended complaint, the government said it had narrowed the date of removal to “in or about 1972” and had identified the looting ring that took it. The ring was not identified in the papers.

Prosecutors said the looters turned the statue over to a Thai middleman, and it ended up in the hands of a “collector,” but the papers do not name him. The collector is said to have sold the statue to a London dealer, Spink & Son, a major purveyor of Asian artifacts now reincorporated under the name Spink. In 1975, the statue was bought by the husband, now dead, of a Belgian woman named Decia Ruspoli di Poggio Suasa, who turned the work over to Sotheby’s for auction in 2010.

The government contends Sotheby’s left out the name of the collector who sold the statue to Spink and other details about the statue’s provenance to mask the trail of the artwork. Sotheby’s denied that, saying it left out the name of the collector because he had no role in the deal.

Douglas A. J. Latchford, an Asian art collector, donor and adviser to the Cambodian government on Khmer antiquities, said by phone from Bangkok that he is the collector referred to in the court papers.

He said Spink bought the statue in Thailand in late 1971 or 1972. He said he is listed by name on Spink’s original ownership papers because, unknown to him, the company had used his funds for “accounting purposes” to purchase the statue. He said he never had possession of the statue.

Mr. Latchford rejected government claims that he and Spink knew the statue was stolen from Cambodia and conspired to “fraudulently obtain export licenses” to send it from Thailand to England in 1972. He said the case “is based on suppositions — they have no facts.”

Prosecutors also say Sotheby’s tried to mislead potential buyers and the Cambodian and United States governments by concocting a tale that the sculpture had been seen by a “scholar” in London in the 1960s, four years before its actual theft.

The date is significant because most American museums will no longer purchase antiquities without proof that they left their countries before 1970, the date of a United Nations covenant aimed at protecting cultural heritage items from looters and disreputable buyers.

The evidence collected by the government includes an e-mail from a Sotheby’s official to the Khmer scholar, Emma C. Bunker, that in part reads, “If I can push the provenance back to 1970, then U.S. museums can participate in the auction without any hindrance.”

Sotheby’s said, “This e-mail illustrates the appropriate due diligence” that the house undertook “to learn the provenance of the statue prior to 1975.” The auction house says it gave the government a document that shows that Ms. Bunker told it that the sighting was in the 1960s.