International squabble locks up art

<a href=>www.orlandosentinel.com>The Associated Press Posted June 12, 2003

MIAMI -- A Spanish art-gallery owner claims she owns two paintings worth $10 million that were seized in a drug investigation considered bizarre even by Miami standards.

"It is obviously a very interesting case," said U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Dube. "I know a lot more about art than I did before."

He said he would issue a recommendation after mid-July on a request by Barcelona gallery owner Helena De Saro to undo a court order blocking her from claiming the paintings by Goya and the Japanese artist Tsuguharu Foujita.

De Saro insists she had been holding the Goya since 1990 and the Foujita since 1989 as investments and shipped them from Geneva to New York for possible sale in 2002.

They wound up in a Miami art-storage center for inspection by possible buyers through a Spanish financier, Jose Maria Clemente, who prosecutors say owed a $10 million debt to drug traffickers.

Clemente has been jailed while under investigation in Spain since December and was indicted last year in Miami.

Clemente is charged along with a banker who married into the Saudi royal family and the banker's ex-girlfriend in a 2-ton Colombian cocaine shipment from Venezuela via Saudi Arabia to Paris on the banker's private jet under diplomatic immunity in 1999.

Prosecutors say the banker, Nayef Al-Shaalan, is a prince, but the Saudi Embassy denies that.

The ex-girlfriend, Coral Gables real-estate agent Doris Mangeri Salazar, is the only one in U.S. custody in the case.

De Saro said she didn't have a bill of sale, invoice or other sales records to prove she owns the paintings but has their certificates of authenticity.

"It made absolutely no sense," prosecutor Jacqueline Arango said of De Saro's explanation.

Arango indicated that De Saro "could be a confederate of an indicted defendant."

"It's a classic situation where you have people out there who are nominee owners of property," she said.

De Saro's attorney, Sharon Keggeirs, argued the paintings may be in a legal limbo forever.

The government wants them to be forfeited by Clemente, but decisions on forfeiture are made only after defendants are convicted, and Spain has rejected U.S. extradition requests before.

De Saro's attorney said: "The government's taken $10 million of Ms. De Saro's property. She may not get an opportunity to have her day in court, and the government says, 'So what?' "