French
furniture expert and restorer guilty of fake 18th-century chair scam
Bill Pallot
and Bruno Desnoues claimed chairs had adorned rooms of Marie Antoinette, in
multimillion-euro con
Angelique
Chrisafis in Paris
Wed 11 Jun
2025 15.49 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/11/french-furniture-expert-restorer-fake-chair-scam
A French
furniture expert and a renowned restorer have been found guilty of conning the
art world with a multimillion-euro scam in which they faked 18th-century chairs
they claimed had adorned the rooms of historic figures including Marie
Antoinette.
In one of
the biggest forgery scandals to hit the French art world for decades, the two
men duped not just wealthy collectors including a Qatari prince but also the
Palace of Versailles.
The chateau,
which before the French Revolution was home to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette,
spent more than €1.5m (£1.3m) acquiring six royal chairs that were fakes. The
case was seen as extremely damaging to France’s reputation as a world centre
for heritage and museum collections. After the police investigation began, in
2016 the ministry of culture ordered an audit of Versailles’s acquisitions
policy.
Bill Pallot,
61, who was known as the world’s leading expert on 18th-century royal French
furniture, wrote the definitive book about seats of that era and was nicknamed
Père La Chaise. On Wednesday he was given a four-year suspended prison sentence
and a €200,000 fine. He was also sentenced to four months in prison, which he
had already served on remand after his arrest.
The judges
ruled that between 2008 and 2015, Pallot was behind the scam in which he and
one of France’s most acclaimed woodcarvers and restorers, Bruno Desnoues,
produced what the court in Pontoise heard were “extraordinarily convincing”
fake 18th-century chairs.
The court
was told that the scheme began as a bet between Pallot and Desnoues to see who
could be duped by fake seats. Pallot told the trial: “We said we’d do it as a
game, to see if the art market noticed or not.”
The men used
old wooden frames of real 18th-century chairs as a base so that the dating of
the wood could be authentic, but the trial was told that everything about the
chairs was fake. Soon, through some of Paris’s top galleries and auction
houses, the chairs were selling for hundreds of thousands of euros each to
wealthy collectors including a Qatari prince. The scam is estimated to have
caused €4.5m in damages.
Desnoues had
previously worked as a restorer of furniture for the Château de Versailles,
where he had once been commissioned for a restoration of Louis XVI’s bed. He
told the court: “I’m into work and sculpture. I’ve never been passionate about
money.”
During the
investigation, Desnoues’s wife described the antiques world her husband worked
in as “a detestable environment where antique dealers want to make money at any
cost”. Desnoues was given a three-year suspended prison sentence and a €100,000
fine. He was also given a four-month prison sentence, which he had already
served on remand.
The scam was
discovered in 2014 when tax authorities noticed suspicious financial and
property transactions for large sums being made by a couple outside Paris who
had a relatively low income. A money-laundering investigation led police to
find a link to Desnoues and what became known in France as the “fake chair”
scam. The investigation took nine years.
Laurent
Kraemer, an art and antiques dealer at the prestigious Kraemer Gallery, who
sold four of the chairs, told the court he and his team were “100% convinced,
without a doubt, that these were authentic chairs”. His gallery was acquitted
of charges of negligence.
Several
experts told the court that the fraud was “blatant” and could have been spotted
if the fakes had been compared with real chairs at Versailles. One expert said
anomalies in the chairs were visible to the naked eye, notably the absence of
signs that the wood had retracted with time.
Pallot told
the court: “It’s said there is no such thing as the perfect crime. There’s no
such thing as a perfect fake either. We could have done better. We’re not good
forgers. We didn’t make the wood retract.”
‘Everything
was fake but the money’: forgers in Versailles chair scandal await sentencing
Antiques
dealer Bill Pallot and accomplice Bruno Desnoues sold €3.7m worth of
counterfeit royal furniture
Vincent Noce
5 May 2025
Bill Pallot
has said that the scam started in 2007 as “a joke” to see if he could dupe
antiques experts Baptiste Giroudon/
It has been
almost a decade since the Parisian antiques dealer Bill Pallot stunned the art
world by confessing to faking a series of royal chairs. According to the case,
filed in 2016, 11 chairs and armchairs, presented as commissioned by relatives
of Louis XV and Louis XVI, were sold for a total of €3.7m through Parisian
galleries and Sotheby’s to the Château of Versailles as well as private
collectors including Prince Hamad Al Thani of Qatar and an heir to the Hermès
family. The ensuing investigation uncovered huge profits, off-shore companies
in Panama, Swiss bank accounts, hidden sums in cash and forged provenances—and
has shed light on the dark face of the antique furniture market.
In March,
Pallot, who was the expert of the Galerie Didier Aaron, faced trial for
commercial fraud, along with a carpenter and restorer, Bruno Desnoues, who
admitted to fabricating the forgeries. The prosecutor asked for three years of
prison time, including a two-year suspended sentence for Pallot, and two years,
with a one year suspended sentence, for Desnoues. Both could be banned from
their trade for five years. Their verdicts are expected on 11 June.
If the court
of Pontoise, near Versailles, follows the submissions then neither of the
accused, who spent five months in pre-trial detention, would go back to prison.
The prosecutor has asked for heavy fines: €300,000 for Pallot and €100,000 for
Desnoues, plus the confiscation of €200,000 found in cash in his bank safe.
Pallot also risks the seizure of his Paris apartment on Avenue Marceau, valued
at more than €1.5m. He has already had to sell around 900 objects from his
eclectic collection at auction to cover a €1.8m fiscal adjustment.
But the
heaviest fine—€700,000—was requested for the prestigious Galerie Kraemer, which
sold four of the fake seats. In one case, the gallery sold to Prince Al Thani a
pair of chairs for €2m, which it had purchased for €200,000; the collector was
refunded. Supposedly commissioned by Queen Marie Antoinette, the pair had been
classified by the French state as a “national treasure”, at the request of the
Château de Versailles, which had considered buying them. The prosecutor asked
for a one-year suspended prison sentence against Laurent Kraemer for
“negligence” in his expertise and the making of false provenances.
Kraemer, who
is also charged in another procedure for a series of allegedly fake Louis XIV
furniture, said he was convinced that the seats sold by his company were
genuine. “He is a victim of the fraud, not an accomplice,” his lawyer Martin
Reynaud stated, insisting that he never had direct contact with the forgers,
who were hiding behind a middleman, Guillaume Dillée. A close friend of Pallot,
this expert fled to Australia and was not summoned in court, nor was Sotheby’s
expert Patrick Leperlier.
The scam was
discovered when a delivery driver was arrested after his investment of more
than €1m in real estate in France and Portugal was flagged by the authorities.
He confessed to acting as a middleman for Desnoues, who, when pressed to
explain his hidden incomes, confessed to the forgeries.
Pallot was
the world’s leading specialist of royal seats, and in charge of antique
furniture at the Galerie Didier Aaron. He was a distinguished professor at the
École du Louvre and the Sorbonne and a scholar who curators would question if
they had a doubts about a royal armchair. “I was the head and Desnoues was the
hands,” he told the court. Desnoues was the main restorer of Versailles
furniture and was even invited to make a copy of Louis XVI’s bed for the royal
apartment.
There is
no way the curators could have guessed such diabolic forgeries
Corinne
Hershkovitch, lawyer
Pallot told
the court that their scam started in 2007 as “a joke”, a challenge to see if
they could dupe the best experts. “It went like a breeze,” he said, adding:
“Everything was fake but the money.” As the seats were mostly sold through his
middleman, he claimed he personally never “intended to cheat the palace of
Versailles”. However, Corinne Hershkovitch, the lawyer for Versailles, accused
him of having “trapped the château by making seats which were missing in the
royal apartments”. She tells The Art Newspaper: “There was no way the curators
could have guessed such diabolic forgeries made by these brilliant experts, who
were at the top of their trade.”
No comments:
Post a Comment