$10.4 MILLION PAYMENT ORDERED IN DUTCH ART CASE
A Dutch court has ordered the heir to Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish gallery owner who fled the advancing Nazis, to pay her lawyer a €7.9 million ($10.4 million) bank guarantee for helping recover 202 artworks, Bloomberg‘s Joana Quintanilha reports. Goudstikker abandoned his possessions in 1940 when he escaped the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands; his heir is daughter-in-law Marei von Saher-Langenbein. The court has forbidden her lawyer, Roelof van Holthe tot Echten, from taking possession of the restituted art as payment before March 2. By that date, Saher-Langenbein must give the lawyer the amount as a guarantee to prevent him from seizing the collection. The Dutch government agreed in February 2006 to hand over the works to Saher-Langenbein after a long legal battle; they have not yet left the Netherlands.
