BRITISH FAMILY OF FORGERS ORDERED TO REPAY MUSEUMS OVER $720,000

AVV 4-21 #736479

By Jill Lawless

Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) — A judge on April 17 ordered a family of forgers who tricked a museum into buying a fake Egyptian statue to pay back more than $800,000 to institutions they defrauded.

George Greenhalgh, 84; his 83-year-old wife, Olive; and their son Shaun, 47, were convicted last year of selling forged artworks between 1989 and 2006.

Their biggest sale was a fake Egyptian statue, bought by the Bolton Museum in northern England in 2003 for almost half a million pounds.

The 52-centimeter-tall statue, “Amarna Princess,” was said to represent one of the daughters of Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti and purportedly was more than 3,000 years old. It had been authenticated by experts at Christie’s auction house and the British Museum, but further examination showed it was fake.

The fakes found their way to the United States as well. In December, the Art Institute of Chicago said a ceramic figure supposedly sculpted by Nineteenth Century French artist Paul Gauguin, which graced the museum for ten years, was among their forgeries.

Police say that during a 20-year period the family produced and sold a wide range of fake artworks, including L.S. Lowry paintings, sculptures by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Man Ray and faux Roman, Anglo Saxon. Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities.

Despite their success as forgers, “they were still living a relatively frugal life on the proceeds of their crime,” said Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, head of the Metropolitan Police’s art and antiques unit.

When police raided their modest home in Bolton, northwest England, in 2006, they found it packed with raw materials — stone, silver and glass — along with tools used to create the fakes and documentation to back their provenance.

Rapley said that despite an extensive police operation lasting two years, “there can be little doubt that there are a number of forgeries still circulating within the art market.”

A judge ordered the family to repay $723,000 to Bolton Borough Council, and smaller sums to Sotheby’s auction house and the Henry Moore Institute.

Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to more than four years in prison for forgery and money laundering. His elderly parents received suspended sentences.

Son George Jr., 51, was convicted of benefiting from the proceeds of crime. He was given a six-month suspended sentence.