Seven years after the recovery of a substantial core of stolen artworks in the hills above Nice, the case is back before the courts. A trial involving 10 defendants, variously accused of participating in or benefiting from a scheme to manage and resell illegally stolen works, opened in the French city’s court earlier this month. Also at the center of the trial are several works attributed to Pablo Picasso, which were recovered during a judicial police operation dating back to 2017.
The prosecution stems from an investigation launched after a report from Belgium that important stolen works of art were circulating discreetly on the French Riviera. As French newspaper Nice-Matin reports, Judicial Police investigators intervened undercover, posing as a Swiss collector interested in the purchase and his assistant. The goal was to verify the reliability of the information and identify those involved in the alleged negotiation. The operation led to the organization of a meeting in a Nice hotel, during which a seller allegedly proposed a multimillion-euro cash deal. After the first contact, the agents were led to a house located in Peillon, a village north of the city of Nice, where, according to the authorities’ reconstruction, part of the stolen works would be kept. Inside the home, police claimed to have found a kind of private display of stolen goods. The identified works included at least seven works attributed to Picasso, including Le vieux roi (The Old King) and Le clown (The Clown), as well as paintings, sculptures and other art objects. In total, the seizure involved more than twenty works, which were later linked to several criminal incidents that had occurred in the previous months.
Investigations allowed some of the works to be traced back to an October 2017 theft in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and an armed robbery that occurred the following month in Èze, France. Also reported by Artnews and Nice-Matin, cash, cell phones and documents were also found during the seizure, elements that would allow investigators to establish direct links between specific works and individual crimes. After the discovery, several people connected to the Peillon estate were placed under investigation on charges of receiving stolen property. Even then, other French news outlets, including Europe 1, had described the case as part of an alleged resale scheme aimed at circulating stolen works through private channels, avoiding the public market and auction houses, where controls are more stringent.
The ongoing trial now combines those preliminary investigations into a single proceeding. Prosecutors allege that the defendants operated within a structured network capable of storing, offering, and transferring stolen works of art in different contexts. According to local media, one of the central points of the investigation concerns the role of Peillon’s home, which investigators see as a possible logistical hub for storing and selling stolen works. The court will have to determine the degree of responsibility of the individual defendants and clarify whether the challenged activity constituted a stable organization dedicated to receiving stolen works of art.
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| Stolen Picassos return to court: art theft trial in Nice |
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