This 10th-century Khmer sculpture will be repatriated to Cambodia following a settlement agreement.
In a significant development, a settlement has been reached in the multi-year dispute between Sotheby’s and the Cambodian government about an allegedly looted 10th-century Khmer sculpture, according to the New York Times:
The accord ends a long bare-knuckled court battle over the Khmer treasure, a 10th-century statue valued at more than $2 million. The Belgian woman who had consigned it for sale in 2011 will receive no compensation for the statue from Cambodia, and Sotheby’s has expressed a willingness to pick up the cost of shipping the 500-pound sandstone antiquity to that country within the next 90 days.
A quick recap of the situation: Sotheby’s planned to sell the statue in New York for an estimated $2-3 million during a March 24, 2011 auction. Cambodian officials raised concerns about the work’s provenance and it was pulled from the sale. Federal officials confiscated the work in April 2012 and Sotheby’s entered into litigation over the statue’s ownership. Cambodian officials claimed the statue, and possibly a companion piece now in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, CA, was looted during that country’s 1970′s-era civil war. Sotheby’s countered there’s no proof, the statues could have been removed any time in the past 1,000 years and they were legally exported into the US. However, some anecdotal evidence has the statues in situ in the 1960′s.
Of the settlement, the Times reports:
The settlement, filed in United States District Court in Manhattan, declared that all sides agreed that additional litigation “would be burdensome and would require resolution of disputed factual issues and issues of U.S., Cambodian, French Colonial, and other law.”
The article also states that Cambodian officials are turning their attention to the statue at the Norton Simon Museum.
