NEW YORK — Russian oligarchs have skirted U.S. sanctions through murky high-end art deals, according to a congressional report released Wednesday that urged lawmakers to rein in an unregulated industry favoured by money launderers.
The secrecy of the art world — in which buyers often remain anonymous — gave billionaire friends of President Vladimir Putin access to the American economy even after the United States sanctioned them following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the report found.
Investigators traced US$18 million in art buys to shell companies linked to Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, close Putin associates who American officials say benefited financially from the Crimean annexation.
The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations highlighted loopholes that exempt even the most lucrative art sales from financial safeguards aimed at stopping money laundering.
Major U.S. auction houses acknowledged never asking for the true identity of the buyer, the report found, dealing with an intermediary for the sales in question “even when it was well-known that the ultimate owner was someone else.”
In all, the shell companies linked to the oligarchs moved at least US$91 million through the U.S. financial system after the sanctions were imposed, the report found.
“It is alarming and completely unacceptable that common sense regulations designed to prevent money laundering and the financing of terrorism do not apply if someone is purchasing a multimillion-dollar piece of art,” said U.S. Sen. Tom Carper, of Delaware, the subcommittee’s top Democrat.
U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said he supports legislation to lift the “curtain of secrecy” that has made the art industry a preferred vehicle of money launderers.
The Rotenbergs could not be reached for comment. They have been the subject of U.S. sanctions since March 2014, singled out for their close ties to Putin. Arkady Rotenberg is a childhood friend and former judo sparring partner of Putin. His companies won billions in road contracts in Sochi, the host of the 2014 Winter Games.
Global art sales reached about US$64 billion last year, with the United States accounting for nearly half the market. The industry remains unregulated in the U.S., however, attracting the likes of racketeers and money launderers.
Any reforms to the notoriously opaque art world will face vigorous opposition from well-heeled collectors “who don’t want anybody to know what they have,” said Robert Wittman, a former FBI agent who founded the bureau’s Art Crime Team.
U.S. art sales would plummet, Wittman said, if Congress followed the subcommittee’s recommendation to extend the Bank Secrecy Act to businesses brokering high-value art transactions.
The report points to new anti-money laundering rules the European Union adopted recently for expensive art deals, including verifying the identity of the buyer and seller of the art. That directive followed the release of the so-called Panama Papers, a collection of more than 11 million secret financial documents that illustrated how some of the world’s richest people hide their money.
The congressional report released Wednesday cited an email chain contained in the Panama Papers that listed nine shell companies in the British Virgin Islands linked to the Rotenbergs.
It said the Rotenbergs’ art deals in the U.S. were facilitated by Gregory Baltser, an American citizen and art advisor based in Moscow who has “no plans to return to the United States.”
Baltser’s attorney sent the congressional subcommittee a letter denying allegations that he did business with the Rotenbergs.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
