Missing art treasures found

HUNDREDS of looted treasures – including mosaics from Pompeii – linked to a disgraced British art dealer have been uncovered in Switzerland.

Some 45 crates of “priceless” antiquities were found in a Geneva storage unit – and now have been returned to Italy.

They had been stored for 15 years under a false name but are thought to belong to art dealer Robin Symes, Il Messaggero newspaper reported.

Italian police convinced a Swiss judge that the relics were stolen as some of the artefacts were allegedly already on a blacklist.

Photographs of them had been among thousands in the possession of an Italian policeman who was found dead in mysterious circumstances in 1995 while under investigation for art trafficking.

The treasures in Geneva included classical sculptures, Roman frescos and sarcophaguses, as well as thousands of fragments of an entire wall of an Etruscan temple. A spokesman for the Rome Carabinieri’s specialist artistic heritage squad, which hunts tomb raiders and smugglers, confirmed the operation in Geneva took place last week.

Police found the Swiss storage unit while on the trail of a piece called SarcophagusoftheSpouses, which resembles one in the Louvre in Paris. Symes, London’s most successful art dealer, was accused of being part of a global network of tomb raiders and dealers that spirited antiquities out of Italy.

Journalist Peter Watson’s 2006 book TheMediciConspiracy claimed Symes had sold them on to collectors and museums, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The dealer was hugely wealthy and owned houses in London, New York, Athens and the Greek islands. But after his partner Christo Michaelides, a Greek shipping heir, died in 1999, Symes was involved in a bitter legal battle with his family.

In 2003 he was bankrupted, and in 2005 spent seven months in prison for contempt of court. – Daily Mail