Spanish art dealer wanted for US fraud arrested in Seville

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/20/spanish-art-dealer-fraud-arrested

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A Spanish businessman suspected of having dealt in millions of dollars of fake art – and wanted for fraud in the United States – has been arrested during Easter festivities in southern Spain, officials said on Sunday.

Art dealer Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz was arrested on Friday at a luxury hotel in Seville. Glafira Rosales, Bergantinos Diaz's partner, was arraigned in New York in August, accused of peddling counterfeit art for 15 years as undiscovered works by world-renowned artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

The indictment charged Rosales with several offenses, saying she had charged two Manhattan art galleries more than $30m for 63 pieces of fake art. Each was presented as previously unknown works by 20th-century abstract expressionist artists, also including Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline.

Prosecutors said the galleries sold the paintings for more than $80m, earning nearly $48m in profits.

The canvasses had actually been created by a painter working from a studio at his home in Queens. Each bogus piece was exposed to extreme temperatures and the outdoors to artificially age it, authorities said.

Around 50 of the pieces were claimed to have been the property of a person of eastern European ancestry with residences in Switzerland and Mexico who had inherited the works from a relative and wished to remain anonymous, the indictment said.

The Spanish interior ministry said Bergantiños Diaz was so surprised by his arrest that he had to be attended by medical workers. He is to appear this week before a judge, who will rule on the steps for a likely extradition to the US.