Oscar Stettiner was a Jewish art dealer. According to his family, he owned the Modigliani painting “Seated Man with Cane” before it was stolen by Nazis during their occupation of Paris during World War II. David and Ezra Nahmad are wealthy brothers. They have amassed an exceptional art collection, purported worth somewhere around $3 billion—including 300 Picassos. Stettiner’s estate has been trying to get the Modigliani back for many years and ran into roadblocks along the way, specifically an inability to prove that the art-collecting Nahmad family actually owned the painting itself.
After the leaked papers, obtained along with millions of others by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, revealed Nahmad as the owner of IAC, he told Radio Canada he "could not sleep at night if I knew I owned a looted object".
Stettiner lived in Paris before the war and was able to flee the city along with his family before 1939. After the war, the painting went missing for decades.
In 2008, the Modigliani allegedly resurfaced at Sotheby’s in New York. It was consigned to the auctioneers by the Helly Nahmad Gallery – run by the heir of one of the best-known art dealers in the world.
Stettiner’s grandson Philippe Maestracci believed that the painting was his family’s and the threat of legal issues led to the painting not being bid on. The Nahmad family has been unwilling to relent.
Maestracci then began his quest to reclaim the painting from the Nahmad gallery, which fought his efforts with a surprising argument: the gallery said it had never owned the artwork in the first place.
Instead, it claimed the painting had been bought by the International Art Center SA, a company set up in Panama in 1995, arguing that this meant the gallery could not be sued for the Modigliani’s return in New York.
With the release of the Panama Papers, ownership has been very clearly established.
In the case of the Modigliani, the papers show that the International Art Center (IAC) was set up by Ezra Nahmad and operated by a law firm in Geneva. Mossack Fonseca records show that half the IAC’s shares were transferred to David Nahmad in 2008; the other half followed in 2014. Maestracci’s lawyers argue the IAC is nothing more than a shell company and that attempting to separate it from the gallery is a figleaf.
If you want to learn more about the secret dealings that changed the art world, The Guardian’s piece on what the Panama Papers has revealed in that department is pretty extraordinary.