During a hearing before the investigative chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal, on November 4, the Advocate General requested the lifting of the indictment of the former president of the Louvre and the ‘ex-scientific director of the France Museums agency.
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In July, the revelation of their indictment in the case of the Louvre Abu Dhabi had struck the career of Jean-Luc Martinez, former president of the Louvre who became thematic ambassador, and that of Jean-François Charnier, former scientific director From the Agency France Muséums (AFM), landed in August from its post as culture and heritage manager within the Afalula agency, the French agency for the development of the Saudi site Al-Ula. The curator and the archaeologist are suspected of negligence, even complicity, in the purchase of seven objects of egyptian art of questionable provenance, for a total value of 50 million euros.
The wind could now turn in their favor. During a hearing, Friday, November 4, before the investigating chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal, during which their respective lawyers, François Artuphel and Corinne Hershkovitch, presented arguments stressing the absence of Serious and concordant indices, the Advocate General required the cancellation of their indictment. The deliberation is expected on February 3, 2023.
After the shock of police custody, with questions in burst and handcuffs, Jean-Luc Martinez and Jean-François Charnier, each on their side, immersed in their archives to exhume documents left aside by the police officers of the Central Office for the Fighting Trafficking in Cultural Property (OCBC) to request a nullity of their indictment. This new reading of the procedure nuances the portrait drawn up by the minutes that Le Monde was able to consult, revealing notable differences between the elements of the file and the interpretation made by investigators.
In an email dated February 16, 2015, Jean-François Charnier warns, for example, his team of his doubts concerning two objects now accused, a blue earthenware hippopotamus, for which he fears not to have in Fine of documents of origin, and a bronze sculpture of Isis Lactans, for which he demands a technical opinion complementary to that of the Louvre. It is still he who sends a note, on October 11, 2016, to his superiors to order them to contact the Egyptian authorities before the purchase of a Tutankhamon stele.
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These discharge elements allow, at the very least, to brush a more complex table, cleaned from the risk of rewrite history in the light of the knowledge of a traffic. Jean-Luc Martinez did not wind the doubts emitted by Egyptologist Marc Gabolde about the Tutankhamon stele in 2019, three years after his purchase. He could therefore not mention these reservations during the 2016 acquisition committee. He was never copying the investigation of acquisition files, which did not fall under his functions.
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