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For years, John Eskenazi has been celebrated as one of London’s premier dealers of Asian art from his gallery on Old Bond Street, trading on a family name that has been in the business since 1925.
However the art expert, 73, has been ordered to pay £4 million to a Qatari sheikh after a court found he had sold seven fake artworks, including a sandstone statue from Cambodia and a bust of Dionysus, purportedly from the second century, The Times reports.
Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah al-Thani, whose cousin is the ruler of Qatar, bought the pieces between 2014 and 2015.
The High Court has ruled that Eskenazi, who has supplied the British Museum, must pay £4 million, after the sculptures he sold were officially declared fakes, with experts finding plastic sheeting in the cheek of one sculpture and evidence that artificial weathering techniques had been used on another.
Judge Richard Jacobs dismissed the Sheikh’s case of fraud, ruling that Eskenazi sold the objects in good faith, but ordered him to pay millions in compensation. He said there were a number of areas ‘where Mr Eskenazi had not conducted his business with integrity’ and that some documents were backdated or false, the Daily Mail reports.
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