By: Amani Ibrahim
This investigation reveals how forged export licences and fictitious ownership documents have been used in the trafficking of smuggled Egyptian antiquities in both Europe and the US.
Back in 2018, French Egyptologist Marc Gabolde had already spent more than a year studying an ancient granite tombstone to try and determine its origin. The tombstone – or stele – was unlike any other artifact. It consisted of a royal decree written on a tablet and attributed to that most famous of Egyptian kings, Tutankhamun.
Gabolde was suspicious of the ownership documents relating to this artefact and he took his doubts to the Louvre Museum in France, but they dismissed them. But the French authorities subsequently launched an investigation into seven Egyptian artefacts that had found their way from France to the Louvre Museum in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi.
These investigations came after others made by the US authorities into the legality of trading in the Nedjemankh sarcophagus, which led to it being returned to Egypt in 2019. The French and US investigations overlap both in the names of the suspects involved and in other aspects.
Using information from both the French and US enquiries, we have traced the backgrounds of those individuals alleged to have owned the suspect artefacts. And we can reveal that the same chain of ownership was applied to other antiquities, which ended up in museums and galleries around the world.
We also show how some antiquities were smuggled out of Egypt after the January 2011 revolution and the subsequent unrest and then came into the possession of European dealers of Arab origin. They tampered with the ownership documents and export licenses relating to these objects, which then were able to pass through customs in European countries, because the authorities in Europe failed to implement any precautionary measures.
An estimated 3,000 artefacts were stolen from Egyptian museums following the January 2011 revolution. The American organisation Antiquities Alliance puts the total value of these stolen objects at between three and six billion dollars. Over the last several decade, 32,000 artefacts have vanished before they could even reach the archaeological storerooms of the Ministry of Antiquities and Cairo University. There are no official figures for the number of objects found in illicit archaeological digs that have been smuggled out of Egypt with false ownership documents and export licences and then trafficked abroad.
Egyptologist Susanna Thomas was the first to ask questions about the Tutankhamun stele, when she put out a tweet asking about this stele “that we’ve never heard of before.”
Seeing this tweet made Gabolde so curious that he began to undertake a study of the stele in 2019, with the approval of the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Gabolde expressed his doubts over the ownership of the stele to the Louvre Museum but received no response. The French authorities, however, subsequently began their own enquiries into the licenses relating to hundreds of artefacts which had been sold from France to the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum between July 2018 and March 2020. They accused the Pierre Bergé gallery in France of selling 56 million dollars’ worth of antiquities, dealing in which was legally dubious, between 2013 and 2017.
In May 2022, former Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez was charged with conspiracy, fraud, collaboration with an organised criminal enterprise, and money laundering. His appeal was rejected and the charges were upheld.
In September 2023, the German owner of the Dionysus Gallery of Ancient Coins and Antiquities, Serop Simonian, was arrested and charged with involvement in the smuggling of Egyptian artefacts and with coordinating the suspected illicit sale of antiquities from the Louvre Museum in France to Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2016. These included the sale of the Tutankhamun stele for €8.5 million ($9.2 million).
Simonian denied the charges against him. He insisted that the Egyptian artefacts had not been smuggled out recently but had belonged to his family, and had been brought from Egypt in the 1970s, before any laws had been put in place to control the trade in Egyptian antiquities.
Notwithstanding Simonian’s denial, two other defendants – Christophe Kunicki and Richard Semper, both French – admitted to jointly forging documents for these artefacts.
The French investigators, bolstered by Gabolde’s expert opinions, managed to establish the provenance of the stele, tracing it to the Swiss city of Basel in the 1990s. The documents relating to the artefact indicated that two people had previously owned it, increasing doubts that it had been legally traded.
The provenance of the Tutankhamun stele is similar to that of other antiquities, most notably the sarcophagus of Nedjemankh, which Egypt recovered from America’s Metropolitan Museum in 2019, after it was proved that it had been brought from Egypt illegally in the wake of the 2011 revolution.
The first owner of these artefacts was an Egyptian antiquities dealer named Habib Tawadros. In the 1930s they passed to a German naval officer named Johannes Behrens and were then owned by one of Behrens’ relatives, Bernd Lehmann, before passing through the Pierre Bergé auctioneers in France to museums and galleries around the world.
Painting in five pieces
Origin: Egypt
ear of sale: 2014
Vendor: Auction by Pierre Bergé & Associés with Christophe Kunicki as expert
Buyer: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA
First owner: Egyptian Habib Tawadros
Second owner: German Johannes Behrens
Third owner: German Bernd Lehmann
Fourth owner: Unspecified private group
A member of the French investigating committee, who declined to be named, says that some artefacts are thought to come from ancient collections with no ownership documents. This complicates the process of verifying the provenance and at the same time facilitates illegal dealing.
The French enquiries have raised questions over the identity of Habib Tawadros, the original owner of the artefacts, which are suspected of being sold illegally.
It turns out that Tawadros was an Egyptian dealer in antiquities active in the 1940s. According to “The Tourist’s Egyptian Companion”, Tawadros’ shop was located in El Gomhouriya Street in Cairo.
Another book, “The Antiquities Trade in Egypt 1880 – 1930” documented Tawadros selling several artefacts to the Egyptian Museum. We have also obtained a copy of the archives of the Egyptian Museum, which indicate that the museum acquired roughly 64 objects from Habib Tawadros during the 1940s. He is also listed as the first owner of a collection of original archaeological artefacts sold between 1945 and 1948.
Habib Tawadros was also issued a licence (No. 86) to sell antiquities. His shop contained 5,877 authentic antiquities, including scarabs and both silver and gold beads.
Artifact
Golden sarcophagus of Nedjemankh
Year of sale
2017
Origin
Egypt
Vendor/Vendor at auction
Habib Tawadros
Buyer
Simonian brothers 1971
Pierre Bergé & Associés auctioneers
Jean-Luc Martinez
Present location
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Recovery
Recovered by Egypt 2019, since left Egypt in 2011 under false license, which bore stamp not used in Egypt in 1971.
Yousef Rashid, a visiting lecturer and founder of the Egyptology department at Passion Passport, says: “The Egyptian Museum buys antiquities only from people they trust. Anyone who uses the name of Habib Tawadros, and sale license information relating to him, must be aware that he had no children or grandchildren who could take legal action over this exploitation of his name.”
Dr Monica Hanna, an assistant professor of archaeology and cultural heritage, says that all Egyptian antiquities dealers in the early 1900s had to apply to the Egyptian Museum for a licence to buy or sell items from any archaeological collection. Only after a study had been made of the collection would an export licence be issued, which would include a careful description of each article.
She adds that the majority of licences used for selling antiquities outside Egypt are forged copies of old licences. The use of licences was suspended in 1979, under Minister of Culture Decree 14, and was completely banned in 1983, under Antiquities Protection Law 117.
But investigations show that the following license came into the possession of the Simonian family, who used it to trade illegally in antiquities. So how did two of the Simonian brothers come by this license?
On 29th May 2019, the then district attorney of New York, Cyrus Vance Jr., wrote to the Egyptian minister of antiquities to inform him that two Simonian brothers had used a forged copy of license no. 86 (owned by Tawadros) to sell the Nedjemankh sarcophagus to the Metropolitan Museum, and had used the same licence to trade in other Egyptian antiquities.
The number 1 in the date is handwritten in blue
The licence carries two dates of issue: 11 May 1971 and 1961
he licence does not carry the signature of the director general of the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation.
It bears a stamp reading “AR Egypt”, though at that time Egyptian stamps bore the initials “UAR”
The fact that the Simonians managed to acquire an antiquities licence belonging to Habib Tawadros prompted us to look into the origins of the Simonian family and their links to Tawadros.
The Simonian family is of Armenian origin. Four brothers were all involved in the family trade in antiquities and jewellery, which was set up in Tawadros’s own shop in Cairo, after it was registered in the family name. The family subsequently claimed that they were using Tawadros’s licence by virtue of having inherited it. The US investigation disproved this. The Egyptian authorities had in 1971 cancelled any licence held by the Simonians, so it was clear to the investigators that the Simonians had no authority to deal in antiquities using a licence belonging to the art dealer Tawadros.
Manipulation of licenses for ancient Egyptian antiquities seems to have happened frequently. Past investigations indicate that licence 116 – owned by Egyptian antiquities dealer Farag Abdel Rahim el Chaer – was used in the falsification of invoices and ownership certificates for a number of artefacts.
On 9 February 1975, Al-Ahram newspaper ran a story with the headline: “Armenian jeweller killed in Saqqara in quarrel over antiquities smuggling deal”. It included details of the murder of the fourth Simonian brother, Abraham Simonian, in Saqqara, in Badrashin, while he was arranging a deal to smuggle archaeological items out of Egypt.
The three brothers subsequently relocated from Egypt – one to the US and the other two to Germany.
The American investigators found that, when the Simonian brothers emigrated to Germany and the US, they had with them a cancelled export licence bearing the number 86 as well as forged ownership documents, all for use in trading in antiquities. The 1970 UNESCO Convention stipulates that a valid export licence, ownership documents, and/or purchase and sale invoices are required for any dealing in antiquities. This export licence finally ended up in the portfolio of documents and papers that Richard Semper and Christoph Konecki admitted forging for use in antiquities trading and which Semper submitted to the judge at their trial.
The name of Tawadros is linked with that of the German Johannes Behrens – who was born and died in Bremen – in the chain of ownership of some of the antiquities under investigation in France.
Dealers in the artefacts listed as previously belonging to Behrens, among others, say he was a German naval officer who built up his collection of antiquities during his years of service between 1930 and 1936. But an Egyptologist familiar with the case – who declined to be named – maintains that there is no evidence that Tawadros was active in the 1930s, the period during which Behrens allegedly acquired artefacts from him.
This same source says that the Simonian brothers, together with Roben Deeb, most likely made up the name Behrens to use on forging ownership documents for antiquities, making out that he had acquired them before laws governing the sale of antiquities came into effect.
According to the US investigations, Roben Deeb would forge ownership documents and invoices for antiquities when selling them on the international market, claiming that Egyptian dealers had previously sold the artefacts to German collectors or directly to the Simonian family.
A search for the name Behrens in the Grabsteine index in Germany – part of the geneology.com genealogical database –yielded more than four thousand results. But none of these names matched the years for Behrens’s birth and death (1874-1947) given in the ownership documents. Neither was there any person called Johannes Behrens listed as living in the German city of Bremen.
Six artefacts sold between 2009 and 2016 are attributed to the Johannes Behrens collection, including a table leg with a goat head, which was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2010.
The museum’s director of marketing and communications, Karen Frascona, says the US State Department has revealed that the documentation relating to ownership of the article is of dubious authenticity, suggesting a new case of looting of antiquities.
The provenance of the Tutankhamun stele is similar to that of another ancient artefact, which this time found its way to Switzerland.
The information on original ownership and the doubtful sales record of the stele is similar to that of an ancient Egyptian painted panel, acquired by Swiss billionaire of Egyptian descent Jean-Claude Gandour.
Gandour acquired this artefact in 2014 from the gallery Phoenix Ancient Art in Geneva, which had purchased it at the Pierre Bergé auction house for €1 million ($1.69m approx.).
Documents indicate that its first owner, Habib Tawadros, sold it in 1936 to Johannes Behrens, and that it then went to a private collection in Germany established in 1986 before going on sale at the French auction house in 2013. Because of the doubts surrounding the piece, Gandour handed it over for investigation by the French judiciary.
Not much is known about the half panel, except that it is one of the “red shroud” paintings. According to the Phoenix Gallery of Ancient Art 2014 catalogue, the painting may date from the beginning of the second century CE, the era of the Antonine dynasty.
The hairstyle of the portrait indicates that it probably dates from the time of Trajan – ` 98 – 117 CE – according to the academic guide to the Fayum images. This suggest a probable link between this painting and two other Fayum portraits, given the physical similarity between them.
The former director of the Coptic Museum in Egypt, Dr Atef Naguib, thinks this painting most likely belongs to the group known collectively as “the Fayum paintings” and believes that it was stolen and sold abroad.
The way these artefact were handled abroad and the suspicion that they were smuggled out of Egypt encouraged us to look more closely into how they were trafficked. Despite the dearth of available information on this, the US investigation does shed some light on the smuggling of artefacts from Egypt.
In December 2011, a dealer in antiquities named Alaa Hussein sent Deeb photos and videos of the Nedjemankh sarcophagus, which had been found during an illegal archaeological dig in Minya Governorate (268 km south of Cairo).
With the help of an Iranian businessman named Hassan Fazeli, Deeb was able in 2012 to smuggle the sarcophagus out of Egypt inside a package at a cost of €5,000 ($5,513).
Fazeli shipped the package from the port of Damietta to Dubai using a forged export certificate, incorrect postage stamps, and a fake invoice from a company in the UAE. He also provided misleading information on provenance, stating that it was a Greco-Roman plaster coffin, not an Egyptian one made of gold. Investigators believe that Fazeli claimed the coffin was “Greco-Roman” to make it more difficult to track.
From the UAE, Fazeli sent the sarcophagus on to Germany under a bill of lading which referred to it as “a wooden box with lid” originating in “Turkey” – a ruse repeatedly employed by Fazeli in the smuggling operations he is accused of carrying out.
Hassan Fazeli: decades of smuggling
Hassan Fazeli Trading LLC, based in the UAE, is owned by Iranian dealer Hassan Fazeli.
The company has been accused of several instances of trafficking in antiquities from areas of conflict and unrest. The first was in 2008, when the company smuggled an Iraqi artefact to the US using forged papers, which stated that the object came from Turkey.
In 2010, the company sent to the US five Egyptian antiquities, claiming they were of Turkish origin (translator’s note: the document in this link refers to the Libyan case in the para below), which were then seized by the US authorities.
Similarly in 2011 the company sent to the UK an ancient Greek artefact that it claimed was of Turkish origin and belonged to the Fazeli family. The authorities however established that the object had been stolen from Libya.
US investigators consider falsification of the nature of an article, and of its value and country of origin, as a method of circumventing the law and avoiding border controls.
Once an artefact arrives in Germany, Deeb would set about falsifying the ownership documents, making out that the piece belongs to some established collector, or to the Simonian family, as happened in the case of the Nedjemankh sarcophagus.
An assistant to the Simonians sold several antiquities to museums, galleries and collectors via a company owned by the Frenchman Christophe Kunicki or through the Paris auction house Pierre Bergé.
Artefacts can be shipped from Germany to Paris – where the Egyptian sarcophagus turned up in September 2015 – with no customs shipping documents. This is because there are no border controls between Germany and France, both being within the Schengen zone.
Egyptian antiquities are brought into Europe using forged documents to circumvent the laws relating to antiquities that apply within the European Union (EU). European Council Regulation 116/2009 stipulates that artefacts exported to an EU country that are over 50 years old and with a value between €15,000 ($15,600) and €150,000 ($160,000) must have an export licence.
However, a 2016 report by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media on the protection of cultural property in Germany – under which the artefacts under investigation entered the country – showed that the country’s laws relating to antiquities were ineffective, especially when it came to checking export licences for these artefacts.
EU countries are currently operating under Regulation (EU) 2019/880 of the European Parliament and of the Council. Article 12 of this regulation stipulates that the legal export of antiquities from their country of origin must be established using appropriate supporting documents and evidence. These include export certificates, deeds of ownership, invoices, sales contracts, and insurance and transport documents.
Legal expert and international arbitrator Dr Mohamed Elshahir explains that the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects – in force since 1998 – obliges EU countries to verify that the importing of artefacts is being done legally.
Since 2011, a number of antiquities have come into the possession of the
Dionysus Gallery of Ancient Coins and Antiquities, owned by the Simonian brothers and run by Roben Deeb.
This same period saw the consolidation of the relationship between Deeb and the French dealer Kunicki, which dates from Deeb’s visit in 2010, to the Pierre Bergé auction house. There he was introduced to Kunicki, who then owned the “EURL CHRISTOPHE KUNICKI ” antiquities trading company.
Kunicki and Deeb worked together to falsify the origin of artefacts. And Kunicki and his friend Richard Semper used an old German typewriter to forge ownership documents for these items, making them look like they came from collectors of antiquities.
Kunicki then began exhibiting artefacts owned by Simonian in his company’s gallery in Paris. The Louvre museums in both France and the UAE subsequently bought several artefacts from this gallery between 2013 and 2018.
Princess Henuttawy’s funerary collection for €4.5m ($4.9m).
The statue of Cleopatra for €35m (about $39m).
Tutankhamun stele.
Statue of Isis for €135,000.
Sculpture of wooden boat for €200,000.
Sculpture of hippopotamus for €900,000.
Fayum portrait.
Portrait of Princess Hannout 1
The Egyptian authorities, through the General Administration of Recovered Antiquities, are supposed to be trying to recover antiquities that have been sold by Europe auctioneers and galleries to French and Emirati museums. This agency is specialised in monitoring and tracking stolen artefacts that have been illegally smuggled out of the country, and in working to recover them and returning them to Egypt by all means possible – diplomatic and legal.
We contacted the Ministry of Antiquities to find out what they were doing to recover the antiquities listed above. But the General Administration of Recovered Antiquities refused to provide us with any information on this, on the pretext that “all these question are the subject of investigation and we are not at liberty to discuss them.”
Philippe Reltien (of Radio France’s Investigative Unit) and Aïda Delpuech contributed to this report.
