Law, crime and regulation

AROUND 200 valuable pieces of jewellery, silver, porcelain and furniture were stolen after thieves broke into an Oxfordshire manor house, using sledgehammers to break through two walls.

PRE-COLOMBIAN art valued at €5m in total was withdrawn from sale in Paris on September 12 after the last-minute intervention of the Mexican Embassy.

Trading Standards say they have received a number of complaints from unpaid consignors in the wake of the fine art sale held by Walker Barnett & Hill in June.

MORE than £80,000 worth of jewellery was stolen from the Ardingly Showground on Wednesday, September 3.

THE British Art Market Federation and other campaigners are cautiously optimistic that the government will agree not to extend the Artist’s Resale Right to the heirs of artists who have been dead for less than 70 years until 2012.

Following a confidential agreement between the parties involved, the Fatimid rock crystal ewer ‘sold’ for £220,000 at Lawrences of Crewkerne will reappear at Christie’s next month with an estimate of over £3m.

A DEALER from Exeter has called on members of the trade to beware of opportunists conning sellers by swapping price labels when they purchase antiques.

A retired Massachusetts lawyer has been found guilty of involvement in a major art theft that extends back three decades.

The Reserve Bank of Australia are to challenge eBay on their decision to make PayPal mandatory on all sales listings. The RBA says it will “shortly be holding discussions with PayPal [an eBay subsidiary] with a view to seeking the removal of these rules”.

Tiffany & Co have appealed over the ruling that eBay do not have to police their auction site for fakes before they are sold to unwitting buyers.

The FBI are attempting to track down the rightful owners of 137 works of art, discovered in a New York apartment, which are thought to have been stolen in the 1960s and 70s.

Stolen art and antiques valued at tens of millions of pounds remain at large despite the incarceration of five members of the notorious Johnson family who bragged in a 2005 BBC documentary that they would gladly steal from “the lords, the sirs and the ladies”.

An unidentified culprit used counterfeit cash to purchase an item in an auction of general antiques at Peter Francis Auctioneers of West Wales on July 15.

A YORKSHIRE dealer lost a lifetime's collection in one night when thieves stole the bulk of his Clarice Cliff stock built up over the last 25 years. Art Deco dealer Muir Hewitt lost around 55 pieces of Clarice Cliff when the thieves targeted his shop in the Redbrick Mill in Batley in the early hours of July 26.

Ebay have won a landmark judgment in the US federal courts, which effectively protects their position as an independent trading platform.

THE controversial Treasury-led proposals to radically increase CITES licence charges will not come into effect until next year at the earliest. In some cases CITES permits, required for the export outside the European Union of antiques incorporating ivory and other elements of endangered species, are to rise from £7 for each permit (among the lowest in Europe) to as much as £59 (the highest).

ANTIQUES shops in the West End of London are being warned to watch out for a man who has been stealing valuable works of art using cloned credit cards.

The Government confirmed last week that it is not currently in favour of extending the artists’ resale rights scheme from 2010 to include the heirs of artists.

EBAY Australia have decided to drop the case for PayPal exclusivity ahead of a decision on the matter fro the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

A FRENCH company has launched a new online stolen art database which allows victims of theft to offer rewards directly.