José “Joe” Berardo, Portugal’s top art collector and the
founder of Lisbon’s Museu Coleção Berardo, was arrested June 29 on fraud and
money-laundering charges stemming from allegations that he moved high-value
artworks into a trust in order to protect them from creditors. The
seventy-six-year-old business tycoon was hauled in during a police sweep of
more than fifty residences and businesses and is expected to appear in court
within forty-eight hours of his arrest.
Police are looking into “an economic group” that allegedly
breached contracts with the CGD, as well as two other financial institutions,
Novo Banco and Portuguese Commercial Bank. The three banks filed a joint
lawsuit in 2019, claiming losses of a billion euros ($1.2 billion).
The CGD lost €439 million ($521 million), according to the
allegations. Berardo also faced trouble in 2019, when the collection of his
Museu Coleção Berardo was handed over to the three banks to offset their
losses. Until the, his artworks were formally owned by a company called the
Berardo Collection Association.
The museum collection, which opened to the public in 2006,
includes 1,000 works by 500 modern and contemporary artists, including Willem
de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Cindy Sherman, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Piet
Mondrian. After an agreement Berardo signed with the Portuguese government in
2006, he lent works from his collection to be shown in Lisbon, where some of
them remain. The agreement remains in force until 2022.
In May 2019, Berardo told the Portuguese parliament that
he had accrued no personal debt, having borrowed the funds in the names of
three separate holding companies, and was reported to have burst into laughter
at the suggestion that banks might seize art from the museum’s 900-piece
collection, which he had put up as collateral in order to secure the loans. A
few months later, the banks seized the entire collection and handed over the
safeguarding of the works to the state. The museum has since continued to
operate and was recently named one of the hundred most visited museums in the
world in 2020.
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