Illegal art trade booms in Spain

Few of them were aware that the 15th-century paintings by Fernando Gallego were of the Spanish-Flemish school and would fetch a substantial price on the art market - that is until the day they disappeared. Police have been hunting for the thieves since that time in 1993. The works by the Spanish artist are just a drop in the ocean in a trade which turns over billions of dollars annually and which is believed to constitute the world´s third most valuable criminal business after drugs and arms trafficking.

In Spain alone, police are searching for around 10,000 stolen art works. Thousands vanish in southern Europe every year, hundreds of them in Spain. Spain´s 68,000 Catholic churches have been stripped of countless paintings and statues, but thieves also find their way into aristocratic mansions and even into Madrid´s Royal Palace, where two works by 17th-century master Diego de Silva y Velazquez were stolen in 1989. Professional art traffickers began operating on a larger scale in the 1960s and 70s, when Spain was opening up to mass tourism and priests at country churches could even sell works which ended up on the international market. Today, there is less demand for religious art and burglars target antiquities in country houses. On the international level, the trade is expected to soar in Eastern Europe, a region which is developing tourism and possesses an abundance of beautiful art, experts told the daily La Vanguardia.

The booty ranges from carpets and ceramic vases to roughly carved medieval statuettes and works by Picasso, Dali, Goya, Rembrandt or Giacometti. Big-time criminals are also believed to be involved, including the Italian mafia and Colombian drug traffickers. The actual thieves are usually petty criminals who know little about art. The works are sold by middlemen to antiquities dealers and even to some of the world´s most prestigious auction houses, which ask few questions about their origin. The chain extends from the slum where the thief lives to the mansion where the collectioner lives, La Vanguardia wrote. If the works are well-known, they need to "rest" in a hiding place for a few years before being put on the market. Dealers prefer lesser-known works to a Van Gogh or a Velazquez, which could not be exhibited at a gallery. But there is always the odd collector who will pay a huge sum of money just to have a famous work for himself, police sources said. The person who stole four works including two by Velazquez from Madrid´s Royal Palace, for instance, "is not a professional criminal," a police expert said. "He must be a lover of art who could not resist the temptation of having something so beautiful at home." Many works which disappear in southern Europe resurface in Britain, Germany, France, the United States or even Japan and Latin America. They can also be sold in their country of origin or in other southern European countries, Spain is increasingly becoming a country which also receives pilfered art works from abroad. "I have rescued art from crumbling churches and old monasteries where it was rotting away without anybody to appreciate it," said Rene Alphonse van den Berghe alias "Erik the Belgian", a thief and art lover who became famous in the 1970s and 80s when stealing from Spanish churches was at its height.

Some of the most famous museums of the western world are brimming with pilfered art works, from millennia-old statues of the West African Nok culture to treasures from ancient Greece and Latin American Indian cultures. The fact that other people are now able to admire them is little consolation to the countries which lost a part of their artistic heritage - as it is to the residents of villages such as Arcenillas, where the local farmers had grown used to the presence of the Gallego paintings.

(dpa)