For years, Jean Lupu was one of the stars of the Biennale des Antiquaires de Paris, the long-running French art fair that was laid to rest in 2021.
The elegant gallery of the antique dealer was located in the Faubourg Saint Honoré opposite the presidential palace of the Élysée. But in the basement workshop beneath its elegant showroom, ordinary furniture would have been transformed into royal 17th- and 18th-century cabinets, desks and chests of drawers, embellished with marquetry, gilt bronze, lacquer and veneer plaques. porcelain. This was claimed by the prosecution during the opening of Lupu’s trial in the Paris Criminal Court on June 12, where he faces charges of commercial fraud and money laundering.
Now 93 and retired, Lupu did not show up for the hearing. His wife, Monique, 92 years old either. Both are accused of having transferred more than 6 million euros in illicit profits via bank accounts in Switzerland to those in Panama and Qatar, with the help of a relative who, according to Jean Lupu, “stole” plus more than 4 million euros on six accounts they had opened in Qatar.
At the start of the trial, Lupu’s lawyer, Antoine Vey, said his client, whose health had “suddenly deteriorated”, was unable to attend and that his wife Monique was too “stressed” to be present. The court then ordered a medical examination of the couple and then decided to postpone the hearing for six days to February 2024.
Consequently, the French professional associations, the Compagnie Nationale des Experts, which expelled Lupu, and the Syndicat National des Antiquaires (SNA) – the two civil parties in the case as well as dozens of victims – must wait another eight months to let the trial take place.
The proceedings against Lupu began eight years ago, in 2015, after another French antique dealer (anonymous) who was engaged in a financial dispute with him reported Lupu’s practices to the art traffic police.
Now the prosecution claims that Lupu “has been a forger all his life.” But he says he has never “restored only old furniture to enhance it or restore it to its original state”. Vey also wonders: “What distinguishes a restoration from a fraud?
Jean Lupu, now 93, is charged with fraud and money laundering
Photo: DR
But the indictment provides damning details about Lupu’s activity. According to the lawsuit, he raked in millions of euros from the sale of 19th century furniture that he would buy for less than 50,000 euros, before “completely transforming” them and embellishing them with “false signatures”. Thirty-three stamping tools bearing the signatures of famous cabinetmakers were seized from Lupu’s home by French authorities; craftsmen working for him also reported their suspicions to investigators.
Lupu’s wares have been sold in his gallery or at auctions in Paris, London, Zurich, Geneva and New York. Among his most prominent clients were the Swiss collector Jean-Claude Gandur and Teodorin Obiang Nguema, the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, whose furniture was seized by the French courts when he was found guilty of embezzlement in 2020. A chest of drawers, bearing a stamp by French cabinetmaker Charles Cressent and bought by Obiang for €2.8 million from the Lupu gallery, was sold for less than €200,000 by the real estate agency seized from Drouot in Paris in January the latter, described as an imitation “in the manner of Cressent”. €50,000.
Lupu’s trial was seen as the first positive step after years of successive scandals that have dealt a severe blow to the Parisian antiques trade.
Other similar criminal cases involve Laurent Kraemer of the prestigious Galerie Kraemer, founded in Paris in 1875, and Bill Pallot, a former expert at the Galerie Didier Aaron, both arrested in 2016 on suspicion of selling fake Louis XVI armchairs to the Palace of Versailles. The Kraemer family deny any wrongdoing, but Pallot has confessed to making fake chairs that were sold both to Versailles (for a total of €2.7m) and to collectors like Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah al Thani, the cousin of the Emir of Qatar. The two galleries had to give up exhibiting at the Biennale des Antiquaires; thereafter the event – once the most prestigious antiques fair in the world – declined before disappearing.
