A spectacular robbery of impressionist works of art took place in Zurich on February 10, 2008. A group of three armed and masked men broke into the premise housing the Bührle collection and stole four master paintings: “Garçon au gilet rouge” (1880) of Paul Cézanne, “Ludovic Lepic et ses filles” (1871) of edgar Degas, “Champs de coquelicots près de Vétheuil” (1880) of Claude Monet and “Marronniers en fleur” (1890) attributed to Vincent Van Gogh. The estimated value of the stolen works amounts to 115 million EUR (169 million USD). A 60 000 EUR (88 000 USD) reward has been offered to anyone able to provide a lead for the retrieval of the paintings.
Experts believe that due to the difficulty of selling indexed works, the main purpose of the perpetrators of such acts is to blackmail insurance companies or “art napping” which is used as bargaining counters for the restitution of the paintings.
The robbery of works of art is a common and lucrative practice. Interpol data base has reported that 30 000 stolen items while the trafficking is estimated to be worth 4.1 billion EUR (6.02 billion USD).
One week after the robbery, two of the four stolen paintings have been retrieved: Monet's and Van Gogh's paintings, of a total value of 44 million EUR (64 million USD).
