Dealer arrested forselling artefacts
NANCY Wiener, a prominent antiquities dealer who specialises in Southeast Asian art, was arrested in New York on Wednesday for allegedly selling stolen artefacts from the Kingdom to high-end art collectors, a development welcomed by Cambodian Ministry of Culture officials.
“This is very good news for us,” said Kong Vireak, director of Cambodia’s National Museum. “We are working with our network in the United States to see what we can find from her collection. We hope that it will lead to the discovery of Cambodian art.”
Wiener, a second-generation art dealer whose family sold antiquities to John D Rockefeller III and Jacqueline Kennedy, has been charged with obtaining millions of dollars’ worth of artefacts from international smugglers, including pieces from Cambodia, Thailand and India.
In March, a police raid of Wiener’s gallery led to the discovery of a 10th-century bronze Buddha statue worth $850,000 that is thought to have been smuggled from Cambodia or Thailand.
According to a complaint filed in the Manhattan Criminal Court, Wiener and her co-conspirators began trafficking stolen artefacts as early as 1999, and employed careful techniques to hide the artefacts’ origins and legitimise their sale.
“Defendant used a laundering process that included CONTINUED