Nigel Peverett, a former staffer in the British Museum’s prints and drawings department, stole over 350 artworks during his tenure in the 1970s and 80s. The thefts, detailed in Barnaby Phillips’s upcoming book 'The African Kingdom of Gold', involved Peverett smuggling prints out of the museum, altering them with razors to remove catalog numbers, and selling them at London’s Portobello Road market. Although he was caught in 1992 with 35 prints in his possession, nearly 100 items remain unrecovered.
This revelation underscores a long-standing history of internal security failures at the British Museum, echoing the more recent 2023 scandal involving curator Peter Higgs. The institution is using these historical precedents to justify an aggressive five-year digitization plan aimed at improving collection transparency. The recurring nature of these 'inside jobs' continues to pressure the museum to modernize its inventory systems and address vulnerabilities in its safeguarding protocols.