Dealer’s £3m fraud charge over world’s most valuable coin
A BRITISH dealer has been charged in New York over the fraudulent £3.2million sale of the ‘rarest and most valuable’ coin in the world.
Richard Beale, 38, the owner of London-based auction house Roma Numismatics, allegedly falsified ownership records of two ancient coins, including the Eid Mar gold coin.
Minted to celebrate the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, the 2,000-year-old coin sold in October 2020 for £3,240,000 – the highest price ever paid for an ancient coin at auction.
In January Beale was charged with grand larceny in the first degree and criminal possession of stolen property in the
‘He was like a bolt of lightning’
first degree, plus eight other counts. If found guilty, he could spend 25 years in jail.
A Durham University graduate and former captain in the British Army, Beale enjoyed a rapid rise to success when he founded Roma Numismatics in 2008 despite having little connection to the world of coin dealing.
‘He was like a bolt of lightning,’ said Christopher Martin, the Chairman of the British Numismatic Trade Association. ‘Within a year, he was selling coins worth millions of pounds. That doesn’t happen, but that’s what happened with him. Where did he come from? Nobody really knew.’
In 2014 Beale was allegedly given the coveted Eid Mar coin to sell by his ‘co- conspirator’ Italo Vecchi, an Italian dealer detained by US customs in 1992 for trying to smuggle ancient Greek coins.
A year later, Beale allegedly tried to sell the coin at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, claiming it came from ‘an old Swiss collection’ – trade code for unverified origins.
In 2020 Beale listed the coin at auction, saying it was ‘from the collection of the Baron Dominique de Chambrier’ of Switzerland. Special Agent Brenton Easter said Beale ‘ admitted to me that he paid for the provenance’, but that ‘this was the first and only time’.
When an informant told Beale ahead of the auction that the coin’s provenance was false, Vecchi and Beale allegedly offered them 100,000 Swiss Francs (£88,000) to sign provenance documents, which was refused. Beale is also alleged to have falsified the provenance of the Sicily Naxos silver coin, minted around 430 BC, which sold for £ 240,000, and bought five coins in 2018 from a cache looted in the Gaza Strip.
Accounts published last month show Roma Numismatics had net assets worth more than £10million. Beale, thought to be living in the UK, is due to appear at the New York Criminal Court in May. His lawyer and Roma Numismatics were approached for comment.