National Museum employees tried over painting theft

National Museum employees tried over painting theft

JAKARTA (JP): Two employees of the National Museum were indicted in the Central Jakarta District Court yesterday for allegedly stealing 25 priceless paintings, including five works of the late Basoeki Abdullah and one by Raden Saleh.

State prosecutor Y.W. Mere accused the defendants, Supandi, 41, a resident of Sawangan, West Java and Bambang Widoyono, 38, a resident of Cengkareng, West Jakarta, of selling the museum's collections to a Singaporean collector, Michael Lee, who is still at large.

The defendants, who worked in the museum's conservancy department, were charged under article 363 of the Penal Code for conspiring to steal, an offense punishable with up to seven years imprisonment.

Mere said the theft took place between March and May 1996.

The case came to light in September when five of the stolen paintings were displayed in a Christie's catalog of paintings to be auctioned in Singapore in October.

Among the five on display were Basoeki's Ny. Beni Suherman and Raden's portrait of a Dutch governor wearing the Willems' Order.

Subsequent investigations by police found that 25 collections in the poorly guarded museum had gone missing. They included recently restored paintings by French artists Pigasso and H. de Toulouse.

Police have since managed to retrieve 22 of the stolen paintings. Five of them were returned by Christie's Singapore, which withdrew them from the auction after the theft became known. The other 17 were found in a house in Pondok Indah believed to have been rented by Lee.

It was later learned that Lee had arranged to have the five paintings auctioned at Christie's in Singapore.

The fate of the remaining three paintings was not known.

The National Museum has since tightened its security.

The prosecutor said the theft was initiated by Lee who had known Supandi. Bambang, who had the key to the paintings' storeroom, was brought into the plan at a later stage.

Lee paid between Rp 3 million and Rp 6 million for each of the stolen paintings, but he had only made payments for 17 of them when the scam became known.

Initially, the money was split evenly between Bambang and Supandi. But later on, Bambang took the larger cuts. In one case, he took Rp 5 million and gave Supandi Rp 1 million, according to the dossier.

The trial was adjourned until next week. (12)