A Belgian-Lebanese art collector and alleged financier of the Hezbollah militant group was charged with money laundering and evading sanctions through $160 million in art and diamond transactions.
On March 29, the United States Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York charged Nazem Said Ahmad and eight co-defendants with nine counts of money laundering, evasion of sanctions and customs laws, and conspiracy to defraud the United States and foreign governments. Authorities in the UK froze Ahmand’s assets there on Tuesday, April 18 and one of the co-defendants, Sundar Nagarajan, was arrested.
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Ahmad did not respond to Hyperallergic’s immediate request for comment.
Ahmad owns a vast collection of works by artists including Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat, which he documents on his popular Instagram account, but he has also harnessed the art and luxury goods markets for his own illegal activity. The US government sanctioned Ahmad in 2019, stating that he used an art gallery in Beirut, Lebanon, to launder money, and named him a “top donor” to Hezbollah, which the US designated a terrorist organization in 1997. When he was sanctioned, the US Treasury Department said Ahmad used his businesses to launder money for Hezbollah. The department also said that Ahmad stored his “personal funds in high-value art.”
The recent charges relate to transactions that occurred after Ahmad was sanctioned in 2019. Most of the $160 million is tied to an operation in which Ahmad manipulated the value of diamonds, but at least $1.2 million is tied to illegally obtained art.
The Attorney’s Office, however, says this number is likely much higher.
“Those amounts understate the actual total value of the artwork because part of the criminal scheme involved evading taxes imposed by foreign governments by undervaluing the artwork,” the indictment reads.
The indictment notably does not name the specific artists or galleries who sold work to Ahmad. It does mention a few specific cases, such as a New York-based artist who sold Ahmad six paintings — worth a total of $199,800 — that were smuggled out of Brooklyn’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Ahmad allegedly told the artist not to mention his name. One of those paintings, which appears to be by the artist Stickymonger, can be seen hanging in Ahmad’s home in Lebanon.
Hyperallergic reviewed Ahmad’s Instagram account and the photographs included in the indictment and identified by popular contemporary artists including Nicasio Fernandez, David Salle, Ufo907, Stickymonger, Luke Agada, and Terron Cooper Sorrells.
When reached for comment, Sorrells expressed his disappointment with the situation.
“My gallery and I had no idea of Nazem’s dealings. It’s a shame that most of my early paintings, which I worked really hard to create, are now involved in something like this,” Sorrells said. His works were sold to Ahmad in 2021, the year Sorrells says he quit his “day job” to become a full-time artist.
Sorrells added an all-too-familiar takeaway: “It turns out, not everybody in the art world is who they say they are.”
Source: Hyperallergic.com