Los Angeles:
Kim Kardashian discovered herself caught up in an unlikely international art smuggling row Tuesday involving an ancient Roman sculpture that was imported to California beneath her name.
US prosecutors last week known as for the statue fragment — which was seized at a Los Angeles port in 2016 — to be forfeited and returned to Italy, citing an Italian archaeologist who discovered it saying the piece had been “looted, smuggled and illegally exported.”
Court documents mentioned the consignee and importer name was listed as “‘Kim Kardashian dba Noel Roberts Trust’ in Woodland Hills, California” and referred to an invoice “for the sale of the defendant statue by Vervoordt to Noel Robert Trust, dated March 11, 2016.”
The Noel Roberts Trust is an entity linked to actual estate purchases and sales made by Kardashian and her estranged husband Kanye West in the United States.
Axel Vervoordt is a Belgian art dealer who was accountable for the decoration of Kardashian’s mansion close to Los Angeles, according to the Artnet News web site.
But a spokeswoman for Kardashian on Tuesday dismissed US media reports tying the reality star to the statue, telling AFP they did not include “accurate information.”
The statue itself — referred to as “Fragment of Myron Samian Athena” — is believed to date to the early- to mid-Roman Empire, and depicts a person’s reduce half.
The Italian archaeologist who studied the statue declared it “of classical Peplophoros style… which represents a copy of an original Greek sculpture.”
It was seized at the Los Angeles port in May 2016 as component of a bigger 5.5-ton (5,000 kg) shipment worth $745,000, on suspicion it could be “protected cultural property from Italy” in violation of a law requiring suitable documentation for importing uncommon archaeological things.
Deepening the mystery, prosecutors mentioned the invoice supplied to them by the customs broker for the fragment’s prior 2012 sale to Vervoordt by a gallery in Paris appeared to refer to a various statue completely.
Vervoordt did not promptly reply to AFP’s request for comment.
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