The French weekly newspaper Le Canard enchaine reported in an article published May 25 that French investigators are currently trying to find out whether or not former Louvre Director Jean-Luc Martinez “turned a blind eye” to forged certificates of five pieces of Egyptian antiquity. Reportedly, those pieces included a granite stele (slab) engraved with the seal of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun that was bought by Louvre Abu Dhabi for tens of millions of euros.

In 2018, the Paris prosecutor-general opened a confidential investigation into the case, entrusted to the Central Office for the Fight Against Illegal Trafficking in Cultural Goods. Before the case was assigned to an investigative judge in February 2020, at least three people were charged with being involved in the case, namely well-known French antiquities broker Christophe Kunicki and his husband Richard Semper, as well as Roben Dib, the German-Lebanese owner of an art gallery.

The case against Martinez brought to the fore the issue of Egyptian antiquities that are believed to have been smuggled out of the country following the January 25 Revolution, amid Egyptian demands to return the Tutankhamun piece.

In the wake of nationwide protests in 2011, antiquities were looted from museums, mosques, warehouses and illegal excavation sites. In 2017, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities said that 33,000 artifacts had disappeared over the past decades from the warehouses of the ministry and the Supreme Council of Antiquities.