Less than a week after taking office, the new Minister of Culture, João Soares, has the Miró dossier on his desk.
Time is on his side as later this month, 41 of the 85 works by Catalan artist Joan Miró will have been in Portugal for ten years and can be classified as of ‘national interest.’
State holding companies Parvalorem and Parups, charged with reducing the debt of the controversially nationalised Portuguese Business Bank (BPN), were instructed by coalition government leader Pedro Passos Coelho to auction off the paintings at Christie's in London.
Legal moves to prevent their sale followed with two pending court cases still to be resolved that revolve around the collection’s classification.
The first postponement of the auction was in February 2014 following an injunction.
A further postponement by Christie's followed a third injunction to prevent the collection leaving the country as the correct administrative process was not followed by Parvalorem, a serious error and one for which Nogueira Leite has yet to apologise.
After the débacle in London, Christies wanted nothing further do with the auction, sensibly predicting that a sale could cause ongoing legal problems for any buyer.
Since the auction was announced in late 2013, the Socialist Party’s position was that it wanted the collection to stay in Portugal, a stance that is unlikely to have changed now that they have come to power.
The new Minister of Culture declined to comment on the case, having only just taken over the post, but a year ago João Soares was adamant that the collection should stay in Portugal.
The prosecution's argument is that the works are ward of the state, the companies that were instructed to sell the paintings are state owned and therefore their property, including works of art, is public property.
Francisco Nogueira Leite who chairs the two companies argues that despite being public bodies, Parvalorem and Parups are governed by company law and that he should be able to dispose of the paintings to reduce the sum owed by the failed bank to the taxpayer. His adamance hints at bonus payments that may remain unearned should the paintings not be sold off.
In May 2015, when Socialist Party leader, the current Prime Minister António Costa, presented his draft electoral programme, the Miró collection was not forgotten.
One of the sections dedicated to 'culture' read that the Socialists would keep the collection in Portugal and now they are in government, a more comprehensive intervention is promised with "a rigorous survey of collections that initially were in the private realm, which now are at risk of permanent export, for possible consolidation into contemporary art collections in Portuguese museums."
Nogueira Leite can argue all he wants but he works for the State and if the Socialist administration wants the paintings to stay to the benefit of the Portuguese public, stay they will.
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BPN and Miró
The Portuguese Business Bank's art collection, including 85 works by the Catalan artist Joan Miró acquired from a private collection in Japan between 2003 and 2006, became state property in 2008 as part of the banks emergency nationalisation.
In early 2014, the Miró paintings were scheduled to be sold by its then-owner, Portuguese state holding company Parvalorem, at Christie's in London. They had never been displayed publicly in the country.
The most notable works included La Fornarina (After Raphael) (1929), with an estimated value of £2 million - £3 million, and Femmes et Oiseaux, which was expected to fetch £4 million - £8 million.
The Portuguese government hoped to raise at least USD50 million from the sale. A group of opposition lawmakers appealed to Portugal’s public prosecutor to stop the sale.
Lisbon’s administrative court, however, ruled that the sale had not been decided on directly by the government of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho and that Parvalorem had not breached any administrative rule.
Socialist and Communist MPs also raised the issue in parliament, but their bid to prevent the planned sale was outvoted by the ruling centre-right coalition.
Christie's withdraw the works from sale only hours before the auction was scheduled to start, citing "legal uncertainties created by this ongoing dispute".
The artist
Joan Miró i Ferrà 20 April 1893 – 25 December 1983) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma de Mallorca in 1981.
Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and famously declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.
The Portuguese Business Bank (BPN) scandal
Portugal's Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos told a press conference after a special cabinet meeting that the government was to assure deposits in BPN, and that the management of BPN was to be given to the Caixa Geral de Depósitos under Bank of Portugal's supervision from November 3, 2008, to prevent a financial crisis chain reaction in Portugal.
Portuguese judicial authorities detained the former president of financially troubled BPN. José Oliveira e Costa, who was the CEO of BPN between 1997 and early 2008. He was arrested on charges of suspected tax fraud, money laundering, forgery, abuse of credit and illegal gains.
In spite of having "a market share of around 2%” the case of BPN was particularly serious because of its political implications as Portugal's then President Cavaco Silva and some of his political chums maintained personal and business relationships with the bank and Oliveira e Costa.
In the grounds of avoiding a potentially serious financial crisis in the Portuguese economy, the Portuguese government decided to give them a bailout, eventually at a future loss to taxpayers.
Because of that, the role of Banco de Portugal in regulating and supervising the Portuguese banking system, when it was led by Vítor Constâncio from 2000 to 2010, has been the subject of heated argument, particularly whether Vítor Constâncio and the BdP had the means to do something or whether they revealed gross incompetence.
In December 2010, Constâncio was appointed vice president of the European Central Bank, for an eight-year mandate, being responsible for banking supervision.
Shortly after, in April 2011, the Portuguese Government would request international financial assistance as the State itself would be declared insolvent.
(Wikipedia 2015)
