Sardinia also touches the investigation of the Carabinieri of the Cultural Heritage Protection Unit of Bari who have seized 60 paintings falsely attributed to the master Mauro Reggiani denouncing 23 people in various provinces: Cagliari, Lecce, Naples, Perugia, Teramo, Milan, Florence, Rome, Alessandria, Como, Modena, Cesena, Ferrara, Brescia, Savona, Padua and La Spezia.

The criminal group - made up of art dealers, collectors and occasional speculators - had ramifications throughout the country and had created a commercial network for receiving and marketing false and / or counterfeit works of art, attributed to one of the leading exponents of the abstraction in Italy.

The investigative investigations had started in 2019 after the report by the Association for the protection of the works of Mauro Reggiani denouncing an unusual and continuous request for verification of authentic paintings. In this way it was possible to ascertain that works falsely attributed to the artist were placed on the national market thanks to the complicity of galleries, private collectors and art dealers, mainly through the use of "e-commerce" platforms, thus evading the rules in force on the exercise of trade. A fundamental role was that of an Abruzzo merchant who, through a series of intermediaries, had put into circulation an indefinite number of fake works of art.

The works, which turned out to be copies of authentic paintings, were reproductions extrapolated from the general catalog of Mauro Reggiani's works, published in black and white in the 1990s, geometrically identical to those cataloged, but with different colors from the original ones.

The seized works, offered for sale at prices between 15,000 and 70,000 euros, would have yielded over one million euros. Many victims of the scam who found themselves at home with fake paintings paid thousands of euros.

(Unioneonline / ss)

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