Why the World Customs Organisation’s claims about cultural goods trafficking don’t add up
The World Customs Organisation (WCO) finally seems to have all but given up when it comes to an accurate and detailed analysis of trafficking and the art market, if its 2022 and 2023 Illicit Trade Reports are anything to go by. Several wild claims of trafficking worth billions when it comes to Cultural Goods are not only unsupported by evidence or any reliable sources – they even contradict each other.
Added to this is the WCO’s insistence on the art market being a haven for money laundering while quoting reports that say the opposite. Even its most important anti-money laundering initiative, Project Tentacle, demonstrates that the art market has little to do with what is going in this sphere of crime.
Most intriguing of all is that while it claims a 15% uptick in Cultural Goods trafficking in 2023, it produces no statistics whatsoever to demonstrate this. Also, unusually, no graphs, graphics or tables are included to demonstrate the problem despite many appearing for every other risk category covered in the 250-page plus report.
Almost a data-free zone
When it comes to Cultural Goods, the report is almost a data-free zone.
As the introduction on page 11 tells us, data for the 2023 WCO report comes chiefly from the Customs Enforcement Network (CEN), but this is supplemented by other sources: official government media outlets; international organisations; member surveys and open-source analysis. While these might be helpful, they also increase the risk of misinformation and propaganda. As the Antiquities Forum has discovered on numerous occasions, official reports are not necessarily robust when it comes to the reliability of their data.
Seizures under Project Tentacle, carried out in partnership with Interpol and the Financial Intelligence Units across multiple countries, amounted to $22 million worth of gemstones, currency and precious metals in 2023. The WCO details seizures in this area as follows:
Gold: 116 seizures – 266.3 kilos of golds bars, 153 gold coins and 122 pieces of jewellery
Currency: 153 seizures – US$3.36 million
Wildlife: 1 seizure – 69 Toucans and Macaws
Trade-Based Money Laundering: 1 case connected to high-duty consumer goods and alcohol
Watches: 29 including 4 Rolexes
Meanwhile, Ukraine understandably dominates reporting when it comes to Cultural Goods trafficking.
Of all the statistics published, the WCO’s priority list is perhaps the most interesting. It categorises each of the 11 risk categories for its priority status among WCO members: Essential, High, Moderate, Neutral, Somewhat, Low and Not a Priority. It presents an average priority score for each category, the highest being 5.06 for drugs, and the lowest 3.41 for Cultural Goods.
Despite this, the WCO claims that the annual global value of trafficked cultural goods is in the tens of billions of euros. It gives no source for this but seems to be confusing the figure with the value of the legitimate global art market in 2023, which it puts at $65 billion, using the Art Basel Report as a source.
The tens of billions claim also clashes with another claim, which reiterates the long debunked figure of $6 billion reported in the 2016 UNODC report as the value of the global “underground market” in cultural goods.
“As we will see below, the market has naturally attracted criminals, organized crime groups, and terrorists who seek to launder proceeds of crime and fund their activities,” the introduction to this section states – a claim not held up by what follows at all, especially as it immediately excuses the “low figures” for seized Cultural Goods as under reporting by WCO members as they have other priorities. The report says that although reported seizures of Cultural Goods are low, they have been “consistently trending upwards since 2019”, with a 15% increase year on year in 2023. What the actual figures are, we are not told.
The WCO quotes the IMF and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF February 2023 report) in damning the art market as a higher risk sector for money laundering than other sectors, even though studies such as the US Treasury Report of 2022 concluded it to be lower risk. The FATF report, a seriously flawed and heavily redacted piece of work, largely used case studies that, while involving art, did not involve the art market. In fact, the FATF report acknowledged that the art market was not attractive to money launderers, is regulated by AML laws as well as self-imposed compliance and “In addition, a large part of the transactions carried out in the sector are routed through the banking system, which generally has mature and long-standing AML/CFT controls.”
Ramping up the anti-market rhetoric
The WCO ramps up the rhetoric against the art market by quoting the case of Lebanon-based Nazem Said Ahmad, a man with suspected linked to Hezbollah, whose property was seized from storage near Heathrow in London in 2019 and became the subject of a major investigation. The WCO puts a value of $160 million on the seizures although the figure reported at the time was $1.3 million. How much this case had to do with the art market is unclear. Certainly at least one auction house, Phillips, was involved, but had frozen Ahmad’s artworks and banned him from doing business with them in 2019. The WCO does not name the nine co-conspirators who were charged in 2023, nor whether any of them were part of the art market.
In none of the limited number of cases of cultural goods trafficked from Ukraine mentioned in this report does the WCO mention any links to the art market.
This 2023 WCO Illicit Trade Report comes across as little more than a piece of anti-market propaganda. The failure to publish any hard statistics other than those that are wrong or have no source displays a degree of cynicism, while conflicting bogus claims as to the size of trafficking – $6 billion or tens of billions of dollars – show a lack of care or incompetence that simply undermines the WCO’s credibility.
Yet again, we are faced with an authority that appears to have a pre-set political agenda when it comes to the art market, making claims it cannot support with evidence, then acknowledging that the evidence isn’t there, then excusing this shortcoming by blaming ‘under reporting’. As figures from previous years have shown – and the pie charts of 2019 figures shown above demonstrate – by a very long way Cultural Goods make up the smallest contribution to trafficking by every measure. This is not just true for the number of cases and seizures, but also for the volume and value of items seized of any risk category. In the decade or so since such figures have been reported, this has always been the case, and this fact is supported by every other study published into the subject.
We have written to the WCO asking for the source of its figures and challenging its position on Cultural Goods, and it has informed us that the officer in charge of drafting this section of the illicit trade report no longer works for the WCO. The WCO also says that as the CEN is built for analysts, not statistics, the global data on illicit trade does not exist. If so, how can the WCO quote figures of “tens of billions of dollars” or “$6 billion”? And what about the 15% uptick claimed? This is clearly no more than gossip or guesswork, neither of which has any place in such a potentially influential report. We have now asked the WCO not publish data without giving its primary source, and for them to check that source to ensure it is accurate.
Recent Comments