Several employees from Uzbekistan’s most-visited museum have been jailed for selling original artworks and replacing them with copies over a 15-year period.

Between 1999 and 2014, workers at the Uzbek State Arts Museum in Tashkent swapped several original works including Russian artists Alexander Nikolayev, Richard-Karl Sommer and Victor Ufimtsev, who are all very well known for their work and lived in Uzbekistan over the last century. The group also sold and replaced 25 original works by European artists such as Italian renaissance painter Lorenzo di Credi.

According to the Uzbekistan General Prosecutor’s Office, the state suffered “major losses” but did not elaborate on those numbers.

The museum’s chief curator, Mirfayz Usmonov, was jailed for nine years, while two other museum staff received eight-year sentences.

The alarm was first raised in 2012, when the Italian embassy in Uzbekistan questioned the legitimacy of a painting by Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese, which the museum called a “lost masterpiece of western art”, with the embassy also querying a “long-forgotten” collection of ceramics by Picasso.

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