Kathimerini Greece Newsroom
By Yiannis Papadopoulos
Wednesday’s raid on a Thessaloniki art gallery that is believed to have been trading in forgeries was prompted by a tipoff from a whistleblower who testified to the police’s Cultural Heritage and Antiquities Department on November 19, Kathimerini has learned.
Sources confirmed that three suspects have been arrested in the ongoing operation, one of whom is believed to have actually produced the fake paintings that were attributed to prominent Greek artists.
Officers with the Organized Crime Division (of which cultural heritage is a part) had filled four vans with works of art by Wednesday night and are still removing pieces from the gallery in the center of the northern port city and from a nearby property that was used as a storage space by the business.
Kathimerini understands that the whistleblower had been closely watching the auctions held by the specific gallery almost since it opened, in the early 2000s, becoming suspicious about the authenticity of paintings attributed to the likes of Michalis Oikonomou, Konstantinos Maleas, Konstantinos Parthenis and many others.
What seems to have raised his suspicions is the fact that the gallery did not provide any information about the provenance or showing history of most of the work it put up for auction, but also the sheer number of pieces it seemed to have at its disposal.
The whistleblower became even more skeptical when he noticed pieces that had been advertised by the gallery appearing in international online art catalogs in 2021.
Thanks to the information he provided to the investigating authorities, the family of artist Yannis Gaitis filed an injunction against the gallery on November 29, accusing it of trading in fake works bearing the artist’s signature.
