For years, Jean Lupu was one of many stars of Paris’s Biennale des Antiquaires, the long-running French artwork truthful that was laid to relaxation in 2021.
The antiques vendor’s elegant gallery was situated on the Faubourg Saint Honoré reverse the Élysée presidential palace. However within the basement workshop beneath his elegant showroom, odd items of furnishings had been allegedly being reworked into Seventeenth- and 18th-century royal cupboards, desks and dressers, embellished with marquetry, gilt bronze, lacquer and china plaques. So claimed the prosecution throughout the opening of Lupu’s trial within the Paris legal courtroom on 12 June, the place he’s going through costs of business fraud and cash laundering.
Now aged 93 and retired, Lupu didn’t present up for the courtroom listening to. Nor did his spouse, Monique, 92. Each stand accused of getting transferred greater than €6m in illicit income via financial institution accounts in Switzerland to these in Panama and Qatar, with the assistance of a relative who, Jean Lupu says, “stole” greater than €4m from six accounts they’d opened in Qatar.
On the opening of the trial, Lupu’s lawyer Antoine Vey stated that his shopper, whose well being had “all of the sudden declined”, was unable to attend and that his spouse Monique was too “confused” to be current. The courtroom then ordered a medical examination of the couple and subsequently determined to delay the six-day listening to to February 2024.
Due to this fact, the French commerce associations the Compagnie Nationale des Consultants, which expelled Lupu, and the Syndicat Nationwide des Antiquaires (SNA)—each civil events within the case together with dozens of victims—should wait one other eight months for the trial to happen.
Proceedings in opposition to Lupu started eight years in the past, in 2015, after one other (nameless) French antiques vendor who was engaged in a monetary dispute with him reported Lupu’s practices to the artwork visitors police.
Now, the prosecution claims that Lupu “has been a forger all his life”. However he says he has solely ever “restored vintage furnishings to spotlight them or to return them to their unique state”. Vey additionally questions: “What distinguishes a restoration from a fraud?”
Jean Lupu, now aged 93, is accused of fraud and cash laundering
Picture: DR
However the indictment gives damning particulars of Lupu’s exercise. In line with the lawsuit, he made tens of millions of euros on gross sales of Nineteenth-century furnishings that he would purchase for lower than €50,000, earlier than he “fully reworked” and embellished them with “faux signatures”. Thirty-three stamping instruments bearing the signatures of well-known cupboard makers had been seized from Lupu’s house by French authorities; craftsmen working for him additionally reported their suspicions to the investigators.
Lupu’s wares had been bought via his gallery or at auctions in Paris, London, Zurich, Geneva and New York. Amongst his most distinguished purchasers had been the Swiss collector Jean-Claude Gandur and Teodorin Obiang Nguema, the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, whose furnishings was seized by the French Justice division when he was discovered responsible of embezzlement in 2020. A commode, bearing a stamp for the French cabinet-maker Charles Cressent and acquired by Obiang for €2.8m from Lupu’s gallery, was bought for lower than €200,000 by the seized property company at Drouot in Paris final January, described as an imitation “within the fashion of Cressent”. In the meantime, a desk purchased for €2.7m by Obiang as an André-Charles Boulle, essentially the most well-known cabinet-maker of Louis XIV’s reign, barely reached €50,000.
Lupu’s trial has been seen as the primary optimistic step following years of successive scandals which have dealt an enormous blow to the Parisian antiques commerce.
Different comparable legal circumstances contain Laurent Kraemer of the celebrated Galerie Kraemer, based in Paris in 1875, and Invoice Pallot, a former professional at Galerie Didier Aaron, each of whom had been arrested in 2016 on suspicion of promoting faux Louis XVI chairs to the Palace of Versailles. The Kraemer household denies any wrongdoing, however Pallot confessed that he had made faux chairs bought each to Versailles (for a complete of €2.7m) and collectors corresponding to Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah al Thani, the cousin of the Emir of Qatar. Each galleries needed to withdraw from exhibiting on the Biennale des Antiquaires; subsequently, the occasion—as soon as essentially the most prestigious antiques truthful on this planet—went into decline earlier than its eventual demise.
