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CRIMINAL

Post office thief bags underwear and toy phone

A man has been charged with the theft of thousands of letters and packages while employed at the post office sorting terminal in Alvesta in southern Sweden.

Published: 5 January 2009 13:12 CET

There are no fewer than 1,600 plaintiffs named in the indictment against the 26-year-old man who stands accused of having stolen 2,245 letters and packages with contents worth around 90,000 kronor ($11,500).

A raid at the man’s home in October turned up 133 lottery tickets, 53 pendants, 33 necklaces, five items of underwear, 113 flower vouchers, two compasses and a toy mobile phone.

The man, who has been employed at the Alvesta terminal for several years has now been charged with aggravated theft and breach of post and telecom confidentially.

The management at the terminal had garnered suspicions that items were disappearing throughout the autumn. The post office’s security department was called in and suspicions were soon concentrated on the 25-year-old man.

When the security department arrested the man in October and turned him over to the police he had stolen 40 items of mail that very day.

According to the indictment the man stole items on 26 separate occasions between August and October 2008.

The man has admitted the thefts and has been held in custody during the course of the investigation.

The trial begins on Friday in Växjö in southern Sweden.

ART

Spanish banker gets jail term for trying to smuggle Picasso masterpiece out of Spain on yacht

A Spanish court has sentenced a former top banker to 18 months in jail for trying to smuggle a Picasso painting deemed a national treasure out of the country on a sailing yacht.

Published: 16 January 2020 17:21 CET
Spanish banker gets jail term for trying to smuggle Picasso masterpiece out of Spain on yacht
Head of a Young Woman by Pablo Picasso Photo: AFP

The court also fined ex-Bankinter head Jaime Botín €52.4 million ($58.4 million), according to the Madrid court ruling issued on January 14th which was made public on Thursday.   

It awarded ownership of the work, “Head of a Young Girl”, to the Spanish state.

Botin, 83, is unlikely to go to prison as in Spain first offenders for non-violent crimes are usually spared jail time for sentences of less than two years.   

French customs seized the work, which is estimated to be worth €26 million, in July 2015 on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, halting what they said was an attempt by Botin to export it to Switzerland to sell it.

His lawyers argued at the time that he was sending it for storage in a vault in Geneva but the court found him guilty of “smuggling cultural goods” for removing the painting “from national territory without a permit”.

Botin, whose family are one of the founders of the Santander banking group, had been trying since 2012 to obtain authorisation to export the painting.   

However Spain's culture ministry refused the request because there was “no similar work on Spanish territory” from the same period in Picasso's life.    

In 2015, a top Spanish court sided with the authorities and declared the work of art “unexportable” on the grounds that it was of “cultural interest”.    

Picasso painted it during his pre-Cubist phase in Gosol, Catalonia, in 1906. It was bought by Botin in London in 1977.

Botin's lawyers had argued that the work should not be subjected to an export ban since it was acquired in Britain and was on board a British-flagged vessel when it was seized.

When customs officials boarded the yacht, its captain only presented two documents — one of which was the court ruling ordering that the painting be kept in Spain.

The painting is currently stored at the Reina Sofia modern art museum in Madrid, which houses Picasso's large anti-war masterpiece “Guernica”.

READ MORE: Banking family's Picasso seized on Corsica boat

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