france dinosaur skeleton return mongolia 2725744

France returned an extremely rare 70-million-year-old Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton and 30 other paleontological finds to Mongolia on Monday. The fossils were looted from the Gobi Desert by a European trafficking network, smuggled via South Korea, and confiscated by French customs in 2015. At a ceremony in Paris, French Public Accounts Minister Amelie de Montchalin handed the items to Mongolia’s Culture Minister Undram Chinbat. The cache includes dinosaur eggs and the prized skeleton, worth over $800,000 at the time of seizure and now valued two to three times higher.

The Nahmad family ordered to return a Nazi-looted Modigliani, valued at 21.5 million euros, to a French farmer

La famille Nahmad sommée de restituer à un agriculteur français un Modigliani spolié par les nazis, estimé à 21,5 millions d’euros

The New York State Supreme Court has ordered the restitution of Amedeo Modigliani’s 1918 painting, 'Seated Man (with a Cane)', to Philippe Maestracci, the grandson of Jewish art dealer Oscar Stettiner. The artwork, valued at approximately €21.5 million, was looted from Stettiner’s Paris gallery by the Nazis in 1944. Despite a 1946 court ruling in Stettiner's favor, the painting remained hidden for decades before being acquired in 1996 by the billionaire Nahmad family through an offshore entity.

metropolitan museum returns antiquities iraq robin symes 1234743148

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced it will return three ancient sculptures to Iraq, collectively valued at $500,000. The objects include a Sumerian gypsum alabaster vessel (ca. 2600–2500 BCE) and two Babylonian terracotta sculptures (ca. 2000–1600 BCE) depicting a male and female head. The repatriation follows new information from an investigation into Robin Symes, a dealer accused of trafficking looted artifacts. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office reported that the Symes investigation has led to the seizure of 135 antiquities worth over $58 million, with two of the items seized by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit earlier this year.