Khmer Art Overseas:
The current website of antiquities dealers, Jonathan Tucker & Antonia Tozer of Asian Art, who reside in the Cotswolds in the UK, show they have half a dozen pieces of Khmer artworks for sale. Tucker and Tozer, who established their gallery in 2000, have sold Khmer artifacts for many years and the husband and wife team were previously specialists with the art dealership of Spink and Son in London – a company who have been intimately linked with Douglas Latchford’s nefarious activities for many decades. Included in their Khmer bounty was a hoard of gold pieces - including a head cover, a pair of pectoral ear pendants, a pair of earrings, a necklace, a pair of armbands, an upper-waist band and a lower-waist band – which were handed over to Cambodian authorities in April 2017, and which were later exhibited at the National Museum under the title The Adornment for Deity and Human, and more recently at the temporary Peace Palace exhibition. Several of these pieces of gold jewelry had previously been seen on the cover and inside the 2008 publication, Khmer Gold – Gifts for the Gods, a coffee-table sized tome from Latchford and Emma Bunker, that identified the gold items as belonging to a private UK collection. Taking whatever Latchford said with a pinch of salt, the fact that Tucker and Tozer had the jewelry in their possession, raises lots of questions over the origin of the gold they handed back as well as the numerous Khmer artifacts Asian Art have sold over the past twenty-plus years. Investigations after the release of the Pandora Papers also established that 22 bronze pieces belonging to Skanda Trust were catalogued and put up for sale by the Asian Art gallery in the past. The ultra-secretive Skanda Trust turned out in fact to be Latchford’s own offshore trust in Jersey, where he hid his ill-gotten gains from prying eyes. The pieces currently on sale are in the main from the private collection of Anthony Gardner (and Roger Monks), who was, coincidentally, a director of Spink and Son.
