Austria freight forwarder guilty of stealing Klimt drawings

On Monday, a Vienna court found a freight forwarder guilty of stealing art valued at 1.3 million euros ($1.4 million) and hiding drawings by famous Austrian artist Gustav Klimt in his parents’ attic.

According to Christina Salzborn, a spokesman for the Vienna Criminal Court, the court sentenced the 45-year-old to a two-year suspended sentence after finding him guilty of theft.

The 2012 theft from an Austrian depot had gone unnoticed until 2013 when several pieces were sold by international auction houses but then noted as missing and subsequently reported as stolen.

Among the works the man took were sculptures, artifacts, paintings, and drawings, including by Klimt and Egon Schiele, two of the country’s most renowned painters.

“He was, so to say, an art collector who could not acquire what he was passionate about in a legal way,” Markus Dittrich, spokesman for the Vienna police, which worked the case, told AFP.

In court, the man, who pleaded guilty to taking works found in his possession, testified he did not realise how valuable the art was that he ended up displaying in his home and storing in his parents’ attic.

The man from the province of Lower Austria worked for a logistics company that rented storage space to an Austrian company specializing in moving and storing valuable art, police said.

Police were tipped off in the case by Art Loss Register, an international database of stolen art, which last year received an inquiry about the sale of a bronze ritual food vessel dating back to the 11th century Western Zhou dynasty.

Though it is “quite rare” for thieves to submit an inquiry, the request came from a first-time client in Austria with an email address that “looked suspicious,” Amelie Ebbinghaus, Art Loss Register’s director, told AFP.

Following the tip, Austrian police raided the man’s home and discovered the pieces, some of which were displayed in the man’s apartment and others in his parents’ attic, according to Dittrich, who added that police discovered more than they were searching for..

“A lot of it hadn’t even been classified as stolen, because the owners still assumed it to be in this depot,” he said.