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Cash delivery van driver disappears in France with €1 million

The driver of an armoured cash delivery van disappeared outside Paris early on Monday along with an estimated one million euros, police sources told AFP.

Published: 11 February 2019 14:40 CET
Cash delivery van driver disappears in France with €1 million
File photo: AFP
The 28-year-old man had stopped in front of a Western Union office at around 6:00 am (0500 GMT) in Aubervilliers, a suburb just north of the capital, and stayed behind the wheel as two of his colleagues went inside.
   
“When they came back out, the van and the driver were gone,” one of the sources said.
 
The van was found soon afterwards a few blocks away with its doors wide open, but the driver and the bags of cash, worth some $1.13 million, were nowhere to be found.
   
The two other employees had not been injured, the source said.
   
Loomis, the armoured van company, did not return calls seeking comment.
   
An inquiry has been opened by France's anti-gang squad.
 
The last major such heist was in November 2009 when Toni Musulin fled in the armoured van he was driving with at least 11.5 million euros in cash collected from a Bank of France building in Lyon.
   
He was caught after a little more than a week on the run.

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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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