Dutch art sting with a twist
Charlie Hamilton and Lizette van Hecke

A badly damaged Paul Desire Trouillebert painting was among the recovered works. Courtesy Rien Zilvold

A business executive who had been based in Dubai was being held in a Dutch jail last night after being accused of taking part in the theft of works by some of the art world`s biggest names. The man, 45, who once headed the Dubai office of one of the world`s largest conference management companies, was arrested during a police sting in the Netherlands with his 62-year-old mother, from Plombie`res in Belgium, and an unidentified 66-year-old man from Walem in the Netherlands. All three are due to appear before a court in Rotterdam today. The hearing will be in private. The arrests come as the latest twist in a complex tale that began more than 20 years earlier with the theft of nine paintings dating from the 17th to 19th centuries. The paintings include works by Pissarro and Renoir, and had apparently been stolen from one of the world`s top art dealers, Robert Noortman. The Dutchman awoke one February morning in 1987 to find that thieves had broken into his gallery on the outskirts of Maastricht and escaped with paintings including La Clairie`re, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bouquet de Fleurs, by Eva Gonzales, and Bords de la Seine a` Bougival, by Camille Pissarro. Despite a long police hunt, no trace of the paintings or the thieves was found for several years. Mr Noortman and the insurance firm Lloyds of London hired a Dutch private detective called Ben Zuidema to continue the search for the stolen masterpieces, but the trail appeared to have gone cold and Lloyds wrote a cheque to Mr Noortman for five million guilders.

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