Law, crime and regulation

FOUR men have been bailed until Ferbruary 25 next year following the police investigation into the theft of five L.S. Lowry paintings.

A private San Francisco bank has emerged as one of the largest creditors of Salander-O’Reilly Galleries.

New York Old Master dealers Salander-O’Reilly are expected to file for bankruptcy after a state judge ordered their gallery to be closed indefinitely.

£10,000 reward put up as police reveal that painting could hold the key to unsolved mystery

Investors in art and antiques will be among the winners of a major reform of capital gains tax proposed in the government’s pre-Budget report.

FOUR men, including two lawyers, arrested in a police raid in Glasgow to recover the Leonardo da Vinci stolen from Drumlanrig Castle, have now been charged in a Scottish court.

Antiquorum, the world’s leading watch auctioneers, insist it will be “business as usual” following the shock departure this August of the Geneva firm’s charismatic founder, Osvaldo Patrizzi, after a row with Japanese owners Artist House Holdings, who acquired Antiquorum for a reported $30m in 2006.

THE dealers who found a cache of work by the artist Sir Kyffin Williams in a secret drawer have given it up in the face of legal pressure.

EXHIBITORS booked for the forthcoming NEC Birmingham and LAPADA Cheltenham fairs are being targeted by Austrian-based scam guide FAIR Guide.

Readers are advised to be wary of cut-price Whitefriars Drunken Bricklayer vases – they may be fakes.

Top British art dealer Simon Dickinson was arrested by Customs authorities on September 14 in connection with the £17m sale of nine Dutch Old Master paintings to the Liechtenstein Museum.

AT Bristol Crown Court last week Torquay art dealer Colin Stodgell was jailed for three years for income tax fraud amounting to £750,000 over seven years.

A substantial reward is being offered for the return of a George III ormolu and white marble table clock by Matthew Boulton stolen from Knightsbridge dealership Hotspur on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 22.

Pictured here is a 16th century gold ring that was stolen from Somerset County Museum in Taunton on either August 6 or 7.

ROGUE bidder Mark Wilson will be subject to criminal prosecution if he continues his spree, Nottingham Insolvency Court has ruled.

A MAN has pleaded guilty to defrauding dealers, auction houses, museums, and art galleries over a 17-year period.

THE Artists’ Collecting Society have completed their first year of collecting and paying out the Artists’ Resale Right. They have now been given the mandate to collect the resale right by 200 artists, including well known names like Lucien Freud and Anthony Caro.

FOR the third time this year, a dealers’ survey has highlighted the unpopularity of the Artist’s Resale Right in the trade and the indifference of a majority artists to the ruling.

Partridge Fine Art lost £250,000 worth of jewellery to thieves at the Summer Olympia Fair. The thieves struck at the dealers’ stand on Sunday afternoon, when four items were taken. The police were informed immediately and Partridge spokesman Oscar Humphries told ATG that they were hopeful of recovering the gems.

Does Rowling have them rattled?