ICIJ’s previous reporting on Latchford showed how the world of private art dealing can rely extensively on opaque financial vehicles and the art market’s well-known lack of transparency to move pieces of questionable origin across borders for huge profits. Experts say that financial secrecy has become a reliable theme in major art-crime scandals and can lead authorities to frustrating dead ends in seeking stolen works.

In a nod to the difficulties even well-resourced investigators face while investigating the art market, Williams* used the ceremony as a platform to seek information about additional stolen pieces still at large. The Cambodian government alone believes thousands of pieces were stolen and remain unaccounted for.

“We commend the individuals and institutions who decided to do the right thing,” Williams said. “We want to encourage anyone out there who believes they have illegally obtained Cambodian or other antiquities in their possession to come forward.”
https://www.icij.org/investigations/pan ... ome-clean/

*Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York

A Looting Matter: Cambodia’s Stolen Antiquities – OpEd
September 2, 2022
By Binoy Kampmark

Cambodia has often featured in the Western imagination as a place of plunder and pilfering. Temples and artefacts of exquisite beauty have exercised the interest of adventurers and buccaneers who looted with almost kleptocratic tendency.

In 1924, the French novelist and future statesman André Malraux, proved himself one of Europe’s greatest adventurers in making off with a ton of sacred stones from Angkor Wat. It is estimated that 20 statutes were taken. Malraux, along with his wife Clara and collaborator Louis Chevasson, were subsequently apprehended for their pinching efforts on the order of George Groslier, founding director of the National Museum of Cambodia. According to the culturally eclectic Groslier, Malraux deserved the title of le petit voleur (the little thief) for such brazen exploits.

The assortment of crises from the 1960s to the 1990s also did their fair share in creating conditions of instability. Where genocide, unrest and a collapse of social order unfolds, plunderers thrive. Archaeological sites offered rich pickings to looters, often in collaboration with local military authorities. The pilfered items would then be taken to the Cambodia-Thailand border and taken to Thai brokers.

With the collapse of the Khmer Rouge, things worsened further. Hundreds of temples were left vulnerable, rich prey to opportunistic authorities and rapacious individuals. Over the course of November and December 1998, the 12th-century temple of Banteay Chhmar fell prey to a raid that saw some 500 square feet of bas-relief hacked into pieces and transported. Antiquities expert Claude Jacques considered it “a case study for looting, every kind of looting, big and small.”

With such a record of extensive, relentless theft, any return of antiquities is bound to be seen as a squiggle upon paper – hardly an achievement. But the recent return from the United States of 30 looted items, including bronze and stone statues of Hindu and Buddhist deities, was a positive note in a field otherwise marked by disappointments. It is, at the very least, a modest addition to other repatriations that have begun to take place from various collections and auction houses.
Full article: https://www.eurasiareview.com/02092022- ... ties-oped/

Cambodia’s Stolen Treasures Must Be Returned to Where They Belong
And no, Cambodia doesn’t need the Metropolitan Museum’s help in preserving its cultural heritage.
by Erin L. Thompson September 6, 2022

The gallery displaying the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of ancient Cambodian sculptures is a clean, well-lit space. Visitors serenely contemplate the art, disturbed only by the occasional footsteps of a guard and the soft woosh of air-conditioning. But Cambodia says that at least 45 artworks in the Metropolitan’s collections were illicitly dug from temple sites by looters and then smuggled out of the country.

Visitors might sympathize with the museum’s reluctance to hand over the art to Cambodia. Won’t it be safer and better preserved in a prestigious museum? Won’t more people visit New York to see this glorious part of humanity’s shared history? As a cultural heritage lawyer, I believe Cambodia has the legal right to reclaim its stolen art regardless of the answer to these questions. But my recent visit to the country showed me that New Yorkers needn’t worry when they say goodbye to the sculptures.

Visiting the temple sites from which the artworks were stolen could not be more different than strolling through the museum. As I wandered the halls of Angkor Wat temple complex and climbed the seven-tiered pyramid at Koh Ker this summer, my shirt was soaked in rain and sweat, my shoes were red with mud, and my pant cuffs fringed with hooked seeds from the vegetation continually trying to creep a little closer to the ruins.
Sometimes, the soundtrack to my visits was the conversation in many languages of other tourists. At more remote sites, I heard bells tinkling around the necks of grazing cattle or the crinkling hiss a column of ants makes on its way through the forest.
Unlike the scentless museum, I could always smell the trees, with occasional whiffs of the incense lit by Cambodians as an offering to the spirits many believe still reside in these sacred sites.
https://hyperallergic.com/758396/cambod ... ey-belong/

Cambodian team hunting looted treasures visits UK museums
By Celia Hatton
BBC News Published 7 hours ago

Two major British museums are opening up their collections to archaeologists and officials from Cambodia, in response to allegations that valuable items are sitting illegally in the UK.

The first visit is to the Victoria & Albert Museum on Friday, followed by one to the British Museum next week.

Cambodia wants the UK to help recover antiquities it says were stolen from its temples during years of conflict.

Both museums have said they are transparent about the origin of items.

The Cambodian delegation hopes to discuss the provenance of objects in the two collections and to examine them in person.

"The challenge for us is that we have been doing our research from long distance, just looking at what is publicly available on the museums' websites," says Brad Gordon, the head of Cambodia's investigations team. "For example, we are not able to see the objects from different angles."

In a statement, the V&A told the BBC that it welcomed the chance to engage in constructive dialogue with the Cambodian government, adding it was interested to see any information that sheds new light on the objects in its care.

The Cambodian team has also been invited to carry out a formal visit to the British Museum in a week's time.

The Cambodians believe that the British Museum, the UK's largest, could have dozens of items in storage that were taken out of their country without permission and then acquired by the museum, as late as the early 1990s.
Full story and photos: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63075846

Cambodia’s missing artefacts: Team to call on Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore
The delegation is eyeing museums in Asia as part of a quest to inspect more than 2,000 lost treasures they say belong to Cambodia.
Justin Ong
21 Oct 2022 06:00AM (Updated: 21 Oct 2022 09:05AM)

SINGAPORE: A Cambodian team on a global quest to hunt down and retrieve scores of what it says are lost national artefacts is turning its attention closer to home.

Singapore, Japan, Korea and Taiwan are slated as future stops after a recently concluded mission to the United Kingdom to examine more than 100 Cambodian antiquities, some of which the delegation believes to be stolen.

Members of the team - which includes government officials, archaeologists, historians and conservators - told CNA on Tuesday (Oct 18) that they expect to open discussions with Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) soon but did not specify a date.

The ACM in August defended its acquisition and provenance processes after Nepalese activists claimed an allegedly stolen 400-year-old religious sculpture was in the museum's possession.

Nepal's Department of Archaeology told CNA it is preparing a report to try and initiate a diplomatic process to recover the object.

The Cambodian restitution team is keen to view the ACM's Cambodian collection, which according to online heritage portal roots.sg contains 136 items.

"We're taking a position that all these museums are very likely not to have any proper export licence documents, and that many of them are sitting on stolen antiquities," said the team's head and legal adviser Bradley Gordon.

"There's lots of space for collaboration with Singapore ... I could see ACM being a great partner. So I think we need to have that dialogue."
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/si ... 102022_cna

Manhattan Prosecutors Return 7th-Century Cambodian Statue Sold by Dealer Doris Wiener
Karen K. Ho
November 3, 2022 4:59pm

The front view of the Standing Sandstone Vishnu, a Cambodian figure repatriated by the Manhattan District Attorney's office. It is missing one hand, one arm, and legs below the thigh. One arm is raised and the statue is attached to a black square column.
The Standing Sandstone Vishnu of Cambodia was repatriated from a private collection by the Manhattan District Attorney's office.
- Courtesy of Manhattan District Attorney's Office

Another piece that passed through a disgraced dealer’s New York gallery has gone back to Southeast Asia.

On Wednesday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office announced the return of a Vishnu statue from a 7th-century temple to Cambodia. The statue was given over in a repatriation ceremony attended by United States ambassador Keo Chhea and a member of the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations team.

The district attorney’s office of Alvin L. Bragg said the Cambodian statue was broken and looted from its original location under Wiener’s direction. After restoration work was completed, the sandstone figure was smuggled into Manhattan through Thailand in 1995 and sold to a private collector.
Full article: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/s ... 234645453/

Ashmolean Museum questioned over looted Cambodian artefacts
Ana Lanzon reports.
Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum
13th November 2022

The Cambodian government has called on British museums to return statues and artworks that were looted during a period of civil war and political unrest between 1975-1979. The looted pieces are scattered amongst the Western art scene after being smuggled to art markets. Cambodia’s ministry of culture is attempting to enable their return in a drawn-out and complex process.

As part of this investigation, a 10th century statue in Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum has been called into question by Cambodian government delegates. The statue, in the “India from 600” room, came into the museum’s permanent collection in 1999 and depicts the Buddhist deity of wisdom Prajnaparamita holding a rosary and a sacred text in her upper hands.

Having once stood within a temple site called Prasat Ta Muen Thomtemple, the statue’s journey to the UK has aroused concern over its provenance. The temple site was controlled and looted by the Khmer Rouge during its brutal regime in the 20th century. Cultural looting came to fund guerrilla campaigns, and the temple’s abundant treasures have since made their way into the black market. The statue has been deemed “highly suspicious” by Brad Gordon, the Cambodian delegation’s legal adviser for its arrival at the Ashmolean in the 90’s. The area was “a no-go zone well into the 90’s” according to Gordon. Documents have been requested to detail the statue’s arrival at the museum, to explain how the plundered object has made its way into a collection in the West.

In response to the delegates’ requests, the Ashmolean has pledged to assist Cambodia’s government campaign in the restitution of looted artefacts. Investigations will be conducted into other objects that have raised suspicion, including a stone figure of a lion, its experts say.

The investigation into the presence of Cambodia’s plundered artefacts in the UK is the latest phase in the campaign, as 30 antiquities were returned from the US in August 2022. The British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum were also called upon in May 2022 to investigate the provenance of objects from Cambodia or identified as ‘Khmer’. In a letter to Nadine Dorries, Secretary of State for Culture at the time, Cambodian culture minister, Phoerung Sackona mentioned that many pillaged artefacts would have “passed through the hands of Douglas Latchford”, a late British art dealer, explaining their presence in the UK.

“This was a time of conflict. The whole world knew it. Large museums like the British Museum or the V&A, they shouldn’t have accepted these pieces,” said Cambodia-based lawyer Brad Gordon in May 2022.
https://cherwell.org/2022/11/13/ashmole ... artefacts/

Interesting long read:

The global hunt for a cache of stolen Thai treasures runs through Denver
The little-known story behind the looting of the Prakhon Chai bronzes
PUBLISHED: December 2, 2022 at 7:07 a.m. | UPDATED: December 2, 2022 at 7:54 a.m.
[excerpts]
BURIRAM PROVINCE, Thailand — The villagers dug through the night — hoping, praying, dreaming to find a bronze statue that could make them rich.

For two years in the mid-1960s, the ground surrounding the 1,000-year-old Plai Bat II temple near the Cambodian border became an excavation zone, a looting mecca.

Virtually everyone in the village took part, said Satien Rojanabundit, a local who was just a boy at the time. Families brought their children to the temple site, hauling cooking utensils and baby carriages as men dredged the hidden vaults for treasures.

When these impoverished rice farmers found a large piece, multiple villagers told The Denver Post, that meant a burgeoning collector named Douglas Latchford would return to the village to see it with his own eyes — and hand out wads of cash.

“Latchford was the man who’d buy pretty much everything,” Rojanabundit said through an interpreter from his house near the temple, recalling how his father made a fortune helping the businessman package and ship statues via train to Bangkok. “Everyone knew you could sell anything to him and he’d give you lots of money.”
...

Boonlerd[Thai dealer] and Latchford set up an office at Rojanabundit’s father’s house, turning the two-story home with faded red paint into a bustling antiquities marketplace. Boonlerd was the more consistent presence, Rojanabundit said, but Latchford would eagerly return when someone dug up a big piece.

Knowing the collector paid top dollar, the villagers just kept digging.

“Latchford had no limit,” Rojanabundit said. “Anything they could find, he would buy.”

Soin Chansri recalled hurrying to the temple after school, bringing rice for his father. The villagers dug in teams throughout the night, knowing they found a chamber when they heard a hollow sound emanate from the hole.

“Everything was so good at the looting site,” Chansri said through an interpreter, standing atop the very ground on which his father used to dig nearly half a century ago. “You could spend all your time there.”

Villagers who took part in the looting say they remember every piece they found at the Plai Bat II temple. Every one would have to be carefully cleaned and washed, with bronzes being the most valuable, followed by stone.

Samak Promrak was in his mid-20s when he started digging for statues. He said he remembers the largest piece he ever unearthed — a 56-inch Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara that’s now prominently displayed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Other relics he said he found now sit in New York’s Asia Society Museum and in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.
Photos and full article: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2022/12/02 ... rt-museum/

Current investigations are gradually uncovering decades of heritage theft from Cambodia and other countries, committed by respected western "experts"...

Unmasking “The Scholar”: The Colorado woman who helped a global art smuggling operation flourish for decades
An investigation into how Emma C. Bunker helped Douglas Latchford sell stolen Cambodian antiquities
By Sam Tabachnik | [email protected] | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: December 1, 2022 at 5:00 a.m. | UPDATED: December 2, 2022 at 5:36 p.m.
KULEN MOUNTAIN, Cambodia — The Tadong temple sits tucked away at the base of this sacred mountain, its crumbling brick structure still upright after more than a thousand years and a bloody civil war.
The holy site draws Buddhist monks who come to meditate and practice mindfulness alongside neon-green rice paddies and farmers wrangling cattle. Ornate carvings remain visible under the lush vegetation. A series of false floors gives the illusion of temples stacked on temples.

But while the feet of an ancient statue of a lion remain nearby, its body is gone. This sight is replicated across the country at hundreds of temples: Buddhas with missing heads, shrines without inscriptions, Hindu gods with no arms.

It’s here, deep in the jungle, where eager looters spent decades robbing the country of its heritage, its spirit — and, the Cambodians say, the souls of their gods.

And it’s here, on the side of Kulen Mountain, where looters stole a sandstone sculpture depicting Prajnaparamita, the goddess of transcendent wisdom. The statue — 59 inches high, 15 inches wide — is missing one arm, the other chopped off at the elbow.

For more than two decades, this stolen relic sat more than 8,000 miles away in the Denver Art Museum’s collection, its journey marked by falsified documents, an elaborate laundering scheme and the assistance of a Colorado woman referred to in court records only as “The Scholar.”

In this three-part special report, The Denver Post details how that respected Denver Art Museum consultant, Emma C. Bunker, helped a man accused of being one of the world’s most prolific art smugglers flourish for decades, legitimizing his looted collection through her work. The Post’s findings highlight the cozy nature between curators, scholars, museums and dealers — and how incentives align to allow the dirty world of the international art market to proliferate.

The investigation also reveals how the Denver Art Museum became a way station for stolen works, serving as a stamp of approval for plundered artifacts. And it tells the little-known story of a 1960s temple heist in rural Thailand that now has U.S. authorities investigating pieces held in the Mile High City.

U.S. and Cambodian officials say the sales of the Prajnaparamita and other relics were part of a decades-long illicit antiquities operation led by Douglas Latchford, a renowned Bangkok-based art collector and dealer. He was indicted in 2019 by a federal grand jury in New York on a host of felony charges, dying before he could stand trial.

But Latchford didn’t do it alone.
Douglas Latchford, left, and Emma C. Bunker (Photos by Tang Chhin/AFP via Getty Images and provided by CU-Denver)
Douglas Latchford, left, and Emma C. Bunker (Photos by Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP via Getty Images and provided by the University of Colorado Denver)

“He’s selling stolen property,” said Bradley J. Gordon, an attorney leading the Cambodian government’s efforts to reclaim that nation’s lost history. “And Emma was part of the sales pitch.”

Court documents and previously unreported emails show Bunker, who died at her home in Denver last year, played a critical role in helping Latchford sell and loan items known to have been pillaged from ancient temples like Tadong. Records from Latchford, shared with The Post, show Bunker overtly discussing how to falsify documents to skirt laws designed to prevent ancient relics from being sold on the open market. And her cachet as a respected scholar from a prominent museum helped validate his pieces as they sold for big money.

The pair also wrote three books together on Khmer art that now are being used as treasure maps for Cambodian archaeologists and Thai government officials hunting for plundered pieces.

“They’re quite insidious works of so-called scholarship that attempt to cover up looting,” said Angela Chiu, an independent scholar who has extensively studied the Asian antiquities trade.

Denver’s art museum recently relinquished four items connected to Latchford and Bunker after the U.S. government moved to seize them last year, including the Prajnaparamita from Kulen Mountain.
https://www.denverpost.com/2022/12/01/e ... rt-museum/