French police arrested two men on charges of stealing one hundred pieces of dishes and cups from the Elysée Palace.
The two were arrested in the Loire and Versailles regions last Thursday. One of them holds the position of Chief Financial Officer at the Elysée, while the other is an amateur antiques dealer specializing in collecting porcelain, aged thirty years.
According to media reports, these operations have been ongoing for more than two years, beginning when the police received a report indicating the disappearance of parts of the Elysée Palace’s tableware, especially those made from Sèvres porcelain.
The investigation showed that the official responsible for the pieces at the palace was removing them, to be received by his friend, the antiques dealer who, in turn, sold them to a collector, whom he met through a Facebook group dedicated to Sèvres porcelain enthusiasts.
One of the suspects' lawyer, Thomas Malfooti, stated that his client admits to the facts attributed to him and has cooperated fully with the investigators, explaining that the suspect is a young man of high intelligence and passionate about the history of Sèvres porcelain to the extent that he was planning to write a book about it, but his passion in this field “blinded” him and he now regrets his actions.
A source close to the investigation revealed that the Chief Financial Officer had been forging inventory records for months. The police managed to recover most of the missing pieces from the home of the suspect who works as a guard at the Louvre Museum, where only a few pieces had been sold by the collector.
The three suspects spent two days in pre-trial detention, and they are scheduled to face trial on the twenty-sixth of February next year.
