I think agreeing to the loan only marginally matters. Ghana has no legal recourse, as is the case with most 19th c. war-looted objects. Its repatriation claim is made in the court of public opinion. They can keep making their case to the UK public indefinitely, long after the loan is finished.

I guess it isn't just the Manhattan DA's office that poses with clear forgeries. It will be curious to see how much of the 'Bactrian' (I doubt this labelling given the lack of expertise involved) art will be repatriated, given the UK does not recognize the current Taliban gov't in Afghanistan

That's diligence not required almost anywhere else in the law. It's been 31 years since the investigation started, almost 15 since conviction. The archive doesn't need to be made public, just shared with the auction houses. To not open it is a tactic to stop the sale of any Italian antiquity.

Can anyone besides Tsirogiannis and the Italian authorities access the Becchina Archive? If not, it's a tad silly for this article to ask if Bonham's attempted to check provenance when the only relevant provenance here is inaccessible. We shouldn't fault auction houses for not doing the impossible.

We’re delighted to announce that the newly remodeled Getty Provenance Index has won Digital Innovation of the Year in this year’s Apollo Awards. [🧵10/10]
Learn more:
www.getty.edu/tracingart/

The video is even more absurd. Half a dozen officers in tactical gear with submachine guns raid a house full of forgeries, knick-knacks and militaria. It's laughable, but one knows that this will now be cited in academic lit. as proof of the scale of the illicit trade.
youtu.be/E7jv9ticDtQ?...

The article concludes with demands for more social history. Yet none of the scholars quoted engage with social history that does not fit into their preconceived beliefs or even with any facts about the provenance of the gems. Discussion where the conclusion is already fixed is no discussion at all.

The decolonial lens here obliterates the Eurasian precious stone trade before, during, and after colonialism. European colonialism was a brief moment in the trade's long history. The focus on Europeans in that trade is ironically the same form of Eurocentrism that imperial chauvinists held.

Was this trade exploitative? Undoubtedly so, mineral extraction has always been and expanded demand led to expanded exploitation, as was seen in the Gulf State pearling industry in the late 19th century. Yet this exploitation was not an invention of European colonizers.
oxfordre.com/africanhisto...