Two children of the German dealer Serop Simonian, who is alleged to have been the head of a trafficking ring specialised in Egyptian antiquities, have been convicted of money laundering in Hamburg. According to the AFP, on 24 August, the city criminal court ordered the confiscation of €32m from the proceeds of the Simonians’ sales and issued fines totalling more than €120,000.
The children’s names were not disclosed, but the charges correspond to those brought against Abraham Simonian and his sister Alice Simonian Schad. The court did indicate that they were involved in the sale, to a museum in the United Arab Emirates, of a bust of Cleopatra, a stela bearing the name of Tutankhamun and a princess’s funerary set. All these and other artefacts allegedly looted in Egypt were sold to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, along with a golden sarcophagus purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The total of sales to both museums amounts to €70m.
In total, €26m was confiscated from Abraham Simonian and €6m from Alice Simonian Schad; they were ordered to pay fines of more than €90,000 and €30,000, respectively. They have launched an appeal, but declined to make a comment. An additional charge against Abraham Simonian, of collaborating with a gang to traffic stolen goods, was dropped for lack of evidence.
More than seven years after the seizure of the golden sarcophagus in New York, which made the case public, this is the first judgement issued in Europe over the Simonians’ dealings, which rattled the museums and heritage sectors.
According to the investigation initiated by Matthew Bogdanos, chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, the Simonians’ transactions went through a French dealer, Christophe Kunicki, now charged with gang fraud in Paris. In 2020, a Parisian judge issued a European arrest warrant against the Simonian siblings, but German courts refused to extradite them, considering the request insufficiently founded. Meanwhile, the French case against their father appears stalled in an overloaded judicial system. In March 2025, after 15 months in pre-trial detention in Paris, Serop Simonian, now 84 years old, returned to Hamburg following a breakdown in the French criminal proceedings.
Abraham Simonian has denied being the heir of his father’s business, although investigators claim he had become more closely involved in his dealings starting in 2013.
The judgement states that, in 2017, Alice Simonian Schad collected €6.4m from the €8.5m sale of the Tutankhamun slab. But, according to a Hamburg prosecutor’s report obtained by The Art Newspaper, Abraham Simonian received the bulk of the income from the business. In 2014, he billed the Louvre Abu Dhabi €4.5m for the princess’s coffins and a Fayum portrait, presenting them as “gifts from his grandparents”. After deductions of the go-betweens’ commissions, €3.8m went to his accounts in the Volksbank in Hamburg. He did the same in 2018 for the colossal marble head of Cleopatra sold to the Louvre Abu Dhabi for the record sum of €35m. His share was €23.5m.
The family’s inventory of around 200 antiquities was later moved to Antwerp, where it was seized in June 2021; the artefacts were registered in Abraham Simonian’s name, according to the police files. In 2020, German authorities seized €4.6m from dozens of accounts he kept across six banks, as well as real estate properties worth €16.5m. Dozens of antiquities and around 200 ancient gold coins, valued at €400,000, as well as a collection of luxury watches, were found at his villa in Hamburg.
