‘Everything was fake but the money’: forgers in Versailles chair scandal await sentencing

It has been almost a decade since the Parisian antiques dealer Bill Pallot stunned the art world by confessing to faking a series of royal chairs. According to the case, filed in 2016, 11 chairs and armchairs, presented as commissioned by relatives of Louis XV and Louis XVI, were sold for a total of €3.7m through Parisian galleries and Sotheby’s to the Château of Versailles as well as private collectors including Prince Hamad Al Thani of Qatar and an heir to the Hermès family. The ensuing investigation uncovered huge profits, off-shore companies in Panama, Swiss bank accounts, hidden sums in cash and forged provenances—and has shed light on the dark face of the antique furniture market.

In March, Pallot, who was the expert of the Galerie Didier Aaron, faced trial for commercial fraud, along with a carpenter and restorer, Bruno Desnoues, who admitted to fabricating the forgeries. The prosecutor asked for three years of prison time, including a two-year suspended sentence for Pallot, and two years, with a one year suspended sentence, for Desnoues. Both could be banned from their trade for five years. Their verdicts are expected on 11 June.

If the court of Pontoise, near Versailles, follows the submissions then neither of the accused, who spent five months in pre-trial detention, would go back to prison. The prosecutor has asked for heavy fines: €300,000 for Pallot and €100,000 for Desnoues, plus the confiscation of €200,000 found in cash in his bank safe. Pallot also risks the seizure of his Paris apartment on Avenue Marceau, valued at more than €1.5m. He has already had to sell around 900 objects from his eclectic collection at auction to cover a €1.8m fiscal adjustment.

But the heaviest fine—€700,000—was requested for the prestigious Galerie Kraemer, which sold four of the fake seats. In one case, the gallery sold to Prince Al Thani a pair of chairs for €2m, which it had purchased for €200,000; the collector was refunded. Supposedly commissioned by Queen Marie Antoinette, the pair had been classified by the French state as a “national treasure”, at the request of the Château de Versailles, which had considered buying them. The prosecutor asked for a one-year suspended prison sentence against Laurent Kraemer for “negligence” in his expertise and the making of false provenances.

Kraemer, who is also charged in another procedure for a series of allegedly fake Louis XIV furniture, said he was convinced that the seats sold by his company were genuine. “He is a victim of the fraud, not an accomplice,” his lawyer Martin Reynaud stated, insisting that he never had direct contact with the forgers, who were hiding behind a middleman, Guillaume Dillée. A close friend of Pallot, this expert fled to Australia and was not summoned in court, nor was Sotheby’s expert Patrick Leperlier.

The scam was discovered when a delivery driver was arrested after his investment of more than €1m in real estate in France and Portugal was flagged by the authorities. He confessed to acting as a middleman for Desnoues, who, when pressed to explain his hidden incomes, confessed to the forgeries.

Pallot was the world’s leading specialist of royal seats, and in charge of antique furniture at the Galerie Didier Aaron. He was a distinguished professor at the École du Louvre and the Sorbonne and a scholar who curators would question if they had a doubts about a royal armchair. “I was the head and Desnoues was the hands,” he told the court. Desnoues was the main restorer of Versailles furniture and was even invited to make a copy of Louis XVI’s bed for the royal apartment.

Pallot told the court that their scam started in 2007 as “a joke”, a challenge to see if they could dupe the best experts. “It went like a breeze,” he said, adding: “Everything was fake but the money.” As the seats were mostly sold through his middleman, he claimed he personally never “intended to cheat the palace of Versailles”. However, Corinne Hershkovitch, the lawyer for Versailles, accused him of having “trapped the château by making seats which were missing in the royal apartments”. She tells The Art Newspaper: “There was no way the curators could have guessed such diabolic forgeries made by these brilliant experts, who were at the top of their trade.”