Geneva art world to launch 10-key points anti money laundering

A group of Geneva-based art dealers, lawyers, and consultants formed a Responsible Art Market Initiative in an effort to alleviate international concerns over the city’s freeports. It is intended to raise awareness of the illicit trafficking of art and antiquities, and the ways in which art facilitates money laundering and other financial crimes.

The project was launched at the Artgenève Salon d’art on January 26 with the publication of a set of guidelines designed to crack down on illegal activity in the city.

The list of 10 guidelines “on combating money laundering and terrorist financing” for vetting buyers and sellers of art have been drafted with the help of art law consultant and former legal director at Christie’s Mathilde Heaton. They include: risk assess your business; know your clients; research the artwork; ownership and provenance; keep records and train staff.

Geneva has come under increasing pressure to improve transparency following a number of seizures of looted art and antiquities from its free port. The publication of the dossier coincided with a conference featuring a discussion between Geneva prosecutor Jean-Bernard Schmid and Ricardo Sansonetti, the head of financial crime at the Swiss State Secretariat for International Finance.

According to a 2014 report by the Swiss Federal Audit Office, Switzerland’s 10 free ports and 245 custom-free zones make the country particularly susceptible to attempts at fiscal optimization or circumvention of international laws governing the trafficking of artworks.

Despite the introduction of tighter regulations, including the independent evaluation of antiques destined for Swiss freeports, and the required identification of tenants, subtenants, and final beneficiaries, the odds remain stacked against regulators—especially as the freeports already house an estimated 1.2 million artworks and artifacts.

The discovery of looted artifacts from Libya, Yemen and the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra comes seven months after an Amedeo Modigliani painting allegedly stolen by the Nazis surfaced in Geneva’s Free Port. That spurred the city’s leading consultants and lawyers to devise an initiative that could become a model for larger art markets in London and New York.

But the participating lawyers and consultants are quick to emphasize that the dossier is aimed at raising awareness of issues affecting the art market on a broader, global scale, and is not designed only for the Swiss market. They hope that their guidelines could be used as a template to apply to the larger art centers of London and New York.

“The idea is to make sure people understand what the threat is, and it is a real threat facing the art market,” Mathilde Heaton, a Geneva-based art law consultant told Bloomberg. “We want to play our role in also combating a much wider problem.”