Alleged head of Egyptian antiquities trafficking ring extradited to Paris

The art dealer Serop Simonian has been arrested and extradited from Hamburg to Paris, as part of an ongoing investigation into Egyptian antiquities worth $60m sold to the Met and the Louvre Abu Dhabi in recent years. The Art Newspaper reports that the arrest and extradition of the 80-year-old dealer took place in September after an European arrest warrant was issued by the French authorities. This follows the arrest in March 2022 of Roben Dib, the head of Simonian’s gallery in Hamburg. Like Dib, Simonian has denied all wrongdoing, claiming that the artefacts belong to his family and left Egypt in the 1970s, when it would have been legal for them to do so. Two dealers, Christophe Kunicki and Richard Semper, have already admitted to providing forged provenance documents for some of the objects in question. Other figures still under indictment include the French curator Jean-François Charnier and Jean-Luc Martinez, former head of the Louvre, who are both appealing against the charges.