Like most laundering cases involving art in the United States, this one was uncovered when the work was illegally transported into the country. In 2004 Mr. Ferreira’s financial empire, built partly on embezzled funds, collapsed, leaving $1 billion in debts. A court in São Paulo sentenced him in 2006 to 21 years in prison for bank fraud, tax evasion and money laundering, a conviction he is appealing. Before his arrest, however, more than $30 million of art owned by Mr. Ferreira and his wife, Márcia, was smuggled out of Brazil, Judge De Sanctis said.
Mr. Ellis serves as Director of Business Development and Marketing of AML RightSource. He has over 15 years of experience in business development, marketing, and professional consulting within the healthcare and financial services industries. Mr. Ellis earned his undergraduate degree from Bowling Green State University and obtained his juris doctor from Cleveland State University – Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.
Checked it out? Good, isn't it? Historical fiction based on the largest unsolved art heist in history? An artist agreeing to forge a famous painting from the original? And the original might actually *already* be a forgery? Seriously, how can I not read this book? The back text here is a great example of what back text should be: enough to really p ...more
Art forgery dates back more than two thousand years. Roman sculptors produced copies of Greek sculptures. Presumably[clarification needed] the contemporary buyers knew that they were not genuine. During the classical period art was generally created for historical reference, religious inspiration, or simply aesthetic enjoyment. The identity of the artist was often of little importance to the buyer.
Vilas Likhite, a Los Angeles doctor, was said to have owned a multimillion-dollar art collection inherited from an Indian maharajah. His collected works included the names of Brancusi, Lichtenstein, Chagall, Casatt, and others. The pieces he collected were best described as "museum quality." At times, he could be persuaded to sell some of these works to trusted friends for exceptionally low prices. However, a recent sale of a Casatt proved to be his downfall when he sold it to an undercover police detective who specialized in art fraud. All of Likhite's carefully documented works, some presented in a three-ring binder, were fakes.
To sum up, the Times muddles the very different issues of ensuring the integrity of works of art—the authenticity question—which is real and requires an entity that can work with owners who want to maintain their anonymity for legitimate reasons with the issue of beneficial ownership—which is less pressing with art because it is relatively rare and covered by the parallel system of KYC run by the banks the auction houses rely upon to vouch for their clients’ ability to afford the works they want to buy.
Once purchased, the art can disappear from view for years, even decades. A lot of the art bought at auctions goes to freeports – ultra-secure warehouses for the collections of millionaires and billionaires, ranging from Picassos and gold to vintage Ferraris and fine wine. The freeports, which exist in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Singapore, offer a variety of tax advantages because the goods stored in them are technically in transit. The Economist magazine reported that the freeport near the Geneva airport alone is thought to hold $100-billion (U.S.) of art.
The primary purpose of tracing the provenance of an object or entity is normally to provide contextual and circumstantial evidence for its original production or discovery, by establishing, as far as practicable, its later history, especially the sequences of its formal ownership, custody and places of storage. The practice has a particular value in helping authenticate objects. Comparative techniques, expert opinions and the results of scientific tests may also be used to these ends, but establishing provenance is essentially a matter of documentation. The term dates to the 1780s in English. Provenance is conceptually comparable to the legal term chain of custody.
The Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS) offers a professional designation known as a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS). Individuals who earn CAMS certification may work as brokerage compliance managers, Bank Secrecy Act officers, financial intelligence unit managers, surveillance analysts and financial crimes investigative analysts.
Fine examples of pottery and porcelain have always commanded high prices, which have, in turn, encouraged the making of forgeries and reproductions. Since many European factories tried to imitate Italian majolica during the 19th century when it was especially popular, forgeries are common. The work of Urbino, Castel Durante, Faenza, and Gubbio was copied freely, and, to a lesser extent, so were the wares of Orvieto and Florence. Most of these forgeries are not close enough to deceive a reasonably expert eye. Potters used natural deposits the impurities of which, for good or ill, often affected the final result; until recently it has been impossible to procure materials in a pure state. In all but a few isolated instances (some German stoneware reproductions, for example) the forger no longer has access to these original deposits and he has to imitate the effect of the impurities as best he can. Although the best forgeries are often remarkably close to the originals, they are not very numerous.
In the late 20th century, art fraud was propelled by a rise in the popularity of art as an investment. With more collectors and museums vying for an ever-smaller number of works by noted artists or from esteemed eras in the history of art, motivations for fraud were exponentially increased. At the same time, modern science made it possible to authenticate works of art to a greater degree than at any time in the past, though even those scientific tests led at times to ambiguous results.
