Stolen Art Watch, Drones With A Sting in An Irish Oligarchy !!

Artwork stolen Culloden Hotel

A painting by one of Northern Ireland's best-known artists has been stolen from a hotel.

Holywood Harbour, an oil painting by Brian Ballard, left, was discovered missing from the luxury Culloden Hotel in Co Down, on Thursday morning.It is estimated to be worth around £15,000

Police have appealed for anyone offered the painting for sale to contact them.

The theft is believed to have taken place within the past two weeks.

Art Hostage comments

Would it be a dam cheek, if whilst checking out a Hotel to hand back the Stolen Gardner Art, the u,mm's helped themselves to this artwork?

Unlike the Palestinians, who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, these fast moving, quick thinking Drones with a sting, how Plato would describe them, saw a chance to gain another artwork with little risk for their days wages.

The Stolen Vermeer must be given back in a fashion that does not involve an exchange.

Because of legal restraints anyone giving back the Vermeer expecting something in return will be arrested and will not receive any reward.

However, if a deal is reached before the recovery, the Vermeer can be recovered, via a confession box, separately and as a result of an anonymous tip off for location, via Art Hostage if I am to be the "Chosen one."

The Stolen Ballard painting is worth the £15,000 retail but only £5,000 legal trade value, £1,000 as a stolen painting and if offered back for ransom, £2,500.

The stolen Ballard painting exchanged for drugs is about an ounce of high grade Cocaine from a major drug dealer, whose bulk cost is about £800 per ounce, the drugs can sold for £2,500 street price and then the stolen Ballard can be retrieved from the drug dealer.

However, as in many art theft cases, the thieves tend to take some of the drugs and never retrieve the stolen painting.

This means the drug dealer looks to sell the stolen painting on to a Criminal venture capitalist.

The Criminal venture capitalist pays about £1,500 for the stolen Ballard and will look to sell it to some successful builder or new money art collector, who still retains the street culture although they are successful in their honest business life as a tradesman etc.

The Ballard would then become a bragging point for the new money art collector not expecting any of his friends to inform on him.

The stolen Ballard would then stay in the new money art collection until death or divorce and then perhaps would surface.

The price to this new money art collector would be £3,000 showing a 100% return for the criminal venture capitalist so there are huge profits for handling stolen art.

With the Police in re-active mode and the judiciary treating art theft as a soft crime, the stealing of high value art will remain a low risk, high profit criminal enterprise that is not only traumatic for the victims, but also really makes people pissed when public artworks are stolen and removed from public view.