Banking chief faces jail, €52m fine for smuggling Picasso

A billionaire from the most powerful banking dynasty in Spain was sentenced to jail yesterday for smuggling a Picasso out of the country on his private yacht.

Jaime Botin, 83, a former bank president whose family controls Santander, was sentenced to 18 months and fined €52.4 million (NZ$88m). Ana Botin, the bank’s executive chairwoman, is his niece.

The court in Madrid also transferred ownership of the €26 million work, Head of a Young Woman, to the Spanish state.

The painting was seized in August 2015 from Botin’s 65m yacht, the Adix, when it was moored off Corsica. He had been ordered not to take it out of Spain three months earlier.

The authorities on the French island said that they had been tipped off about a move to smuggle the painting out of Spain by boat.

The judgment, which can be appealed against, said that the painting had left Spanish territory on Botin’s orders even though the government had prohibited him from taking it out of the country.

Prosecutors claimed that Botin took the work from Valencia to Corsica and had hired a private aircraft to fly it on to Switzerland where, they alleged, he planned to sell it.

Botin, a former president of Bankinter, bought the painting in London in 1977. In 2012 he asked the auction house Christie’s, through its Spanish office, to seek permission from Madrid to take it back to Britain to sell it.

However, the culture ministry refused to grant an export licence, a decision upheld in May 2015 by the Spanish high court, which declared Head of a Young Woman to be a ‘‘national treasure of exceptional importance’’.

In that ruling the judges said that the work, painted in 1906, was one of few still in Spain from the summer Picasso spent in the Catalan village of Gosol. It was there that he experimented in his twenties with a new style that developed into cubism.

Botin appealed to a higher court and was rebuffed, so he took his case to the supreme court, where a ruling is pending. His lawyers had said that because that appeal was still open the criminal case for smuggling should be delayed.

The painting is stored in the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid while the legal action concludes. Botin remains free pending an appeal against the criminal conviction.

The defence argued that Head of a Young Woman had been kept on the yacht for safekeeping and that it went wherever the boat did. ‘‘I told the captain to be careful,’’ Botin told a hearing in November. ‘‘I asked him to pack it and keep it in a box when I was not on board.’’

The defence also argued that the work had never been permanently in Spain and so could not be smuggled out of it.

– The Times