British television presenters Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly—better known as Ant and Dec—have secured a court order requiring an art dealer to disclose details of transactions involving Banksy prints in their collection, as the pair attempts to determine whether an intermediary made undisclosed profits from the deals.
According to the BBC, a High Court judge ruled on March 4 that there is a “good arguable case” that wrongdoing may have occurred in transactions handled by an unnamed art consultant who helped the duo buy, sell, and loan works from their contemporary art collection.
According to court filings reviewed by the Art Newspaper, McPartlin and Donnelly purchased six Banksy prints through the consultant for a combined $736,000. The works were sourced from the London-based dealer Andrew Lilley of Lilley Fine Art Ltd., who allegedly received $401,000 for the prints, leaving a roughly $335,000 discrepancy the presenters now want explained.
The court order will compel Lilley to provide information about his dealings with the intermediary—identified only as “X” in the legal filings—after previous requests for disclosure were refused on grounds of confidentiality.
The consultant had reportedly been appointed on a 10 percent commission to advise the presenters on building their collection, a relationship that ended in 2021.
Lawyers for McPartlin and Donnelly told the court the pair want to “uncover what really happened” in the transactions, which also include the sale of a Banksy print titled Napalm. The presenters say they were told the work sold for about $15,000, though they later learned it may have sold for $17,400.
More broadly, the presenters are seeking information related to 22 transactions involving Banksy works in their collection.
Judge Iain Pester granted the disclosure request using a Norwich Pharmacal Order, a legal mechanism that allows courts to compel third parties mixed up in potential wrongdoing to provide relevant information.
The dealer and his firm are not accused of wrongdoing. Lilley told the BBC he had been “caught up in this mess” and believed he was purchasing works at fair market value, adding that the dispute ultimately lies between the presenters and the unnamed intermediary.
The case also highlights the continued demand for Banksy in the secondary market. Data from the analytics platform Artdai shows that the artist’s auction market has expanded sharply over the past two decades, with an index tracking his works rising more than 9,000 percent since the early benchmark used by the platform. However, in the last five years that market has dropped around 27 percent, a hint that, at least at auction, Banksy’s work has lost some of its pop.
