Posted on 11/17/2005 3:41:33 AM PST by mym
Swiss bailiffs yesterday seized dozens of Impressionist masterpieces on loan from Moscow as part of an octogenarian businessman's long campaign to recover debts from Russia.
The impounding of the paintings, insured for £720 million and including works by Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso and Monet, provoked indignation in Russia itself.
The Swiss government last night overruled the canton that ordered the seizure and allowed the canvasses to return home - but not before a diplomatic scandal had blown up.
"Although the paintings are kept in Russia, they are the inheritance of all people in the world and as such are inviolable," Russia's parliamentary speaker, Boris Gryzlov, told the Duma.
Bailiffs, backed by police, stopped lorries taking the paintings back to Moscow's Pushkin Fine Arts Museum after a five-month exhibition in Martigny.
The seizure was the result of a court order won by Nessim Gaon, 83, a Sudanese-born Jew, now a Swiss national, who served in the British Army during the Second World War.
Mr Gaon claims the Russian government owes his company, Noga, hundreds of millions of pounds after it reneged on a 1992 deal in which Noga supplied it with food in exchange for oil. A Stockholm arbitration court ordered Moscow to pay Noga £70 million in 1996 but Moscow has quibbled over the terms of repayment.
Mr Gaon has used extraordinary tactics to secure his money. After a 2001 court ruling he seized the Russian ship Sedov, the world's second largest sailing vessel, during a goodwill visit to Brest.
Later that year he almost seized two Russian fighters at an air show in Le Bourget. The pilots flew to safety just before the bailiffs arrived.
Fearing a repetition, the Russian air force has not taken part in any air shows in western Europe since.
This time, however, Mr Gaon was up against an equally fiery octogenarian: Irina Antonova, also 83, the Pushkin museum's director since 1961. "This is a totally illegal act and the method of doing it is barbaric and uncivilised," she said before the works were released. "Art shouldn't be held hostage to economic or political disputes between states."
But there will be some figures in the art world, particularly in Germany, who may feel satisfaction at yesterday's drama.
Many works of art were seized by the Red Army from Germany after the fall of Berlin in 1945 as spoils of war. Among those involved in transporting them back to Moscow was the young Mrs Antonova.
Russian authorities refused to admit that most of the art was in their possession until 1994 and the dispute strained relations with Germany for years.
Mrs Antonova rejected any comparisons between the seizure of the Pushkin's paintings and the German art housed in Russia.
She said: "In our case we generously took a superb exhibition to Switzerland to make Swiss art lovers happy and they wrote us many notes of gratitude for it."
Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso and Monet are Russian painters? Or perhaps you think that Russia shouldn't honor her contracts? Or what? Please try to understand that the world is attempting to move away from the ignorance and thuggery that have defined Russia for all of time.
Just seeing that I doubt I'll ever loan them any of my Van Goghs.
Maybe the Russians should pay their depts.
Germany is complaining about art theft?
==Germany is complaining about art theft?==
Yeah, those funny impudent Germans try to.
pong
Do these deals ever work right?
Frank Gorshin?
What standing would the french have to rule in a dispute between a Swiss and a Russian? Besides that we know that the french are easily cowed with a minimum of intimidation. Their courts are corrupt.
What standing did the British have to arrest Pinoche on the order of a Spainish judge? We are entering the fun land of post natinal politics where your citizenship, nationality, or sovereignty means squat to our transnational, global elites who could not give two squirts of piss about you the "dumb" working grug.
The company attempted to seize Russian planes in Paris. That's what gave the French courts jurisdiction.
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