Sotheby's Returns Looted 10th Century Statue to Cambodia

3 years ago, Cambodia learned that Sotheby's Auction House in Manhattan was attempting to sell a thousand-year-old masterpiece for $3 million, the feet of which were still at the temple in Cambodia. Sotheby's was warned by the very expert they hired to appraise the statute that it was quote "definitely stolen." They knew the feet were still there. Despite what their expert told them, they decided to put the statue on the front of one of their more prominent auction catalogs of the year. The Royal Government of Cambodia intervened and demanded that the sale be halted and the piece be returned to Cambodia. Sotheby's did halt the sale, but it refused to return statue. I've long been involved in an effort to research Cambodia's cultural heritage loss. We've been focusing on what the law currently is now, but when I heard that Sotheby's was contesting Cambodia's legislation, we started to focus our efforts more on the historical loss. And it turns out that the temple of Koh Ker and the sanctuary of Prasat Chen, which was the site from which the Sotheby's statue was stolen, were specifically protected under law that said that the site and all of its statues were the property at the state. After the story broke in the New York Times in February of 2012, the US Attorney's Office actually filed a civil forfeiture suit seeking to recover and repatriate the statue to Cambodia. With discovery on the horizon, Sotheby's agreed to settle and send the statue back home to Cambodia, and we hope this will just be one of many. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York voluntarily returned two statues, and we hope that other museums with these statues in their collection will follow.