Up to six years in prison for spending four million public money on false art: Consuelo Císcar, on the bench

The former director of the Valencian Institute of Modern Art, Consuelo Císcar, faces a trial since Tuesday for spending more than four million euros of the public institution in acquiring non-original reproductions of works by the Madrid sculptor Gerardo Rueda. Now, he faces up to six years in prison.

Císcar, who was sentenced last August to a year and a half in prison for prevarication and embezzlement for using museum resources to benefit his son’s career, has defended that all museums “have posthumous works that are perfectly authentic, legal and valid “.

“I knew they were posthumous works (those of Rueda), like all of us who were in the departments of responsibility of the IVAM. The person in charge of the foundry – where the reproductions were made – was a friend of the artist and had precise instructions on how to make them ”, Císcar has declared to his lawyer, since he has refused to respond to any other party.

According to the Generalitat lawyer in his indictment, “in a surprising and enigmatic way, in 2007 (11 years after the death of his father) Jose Luis Rueda, bypassing the executor, he formalizes an addition of inheritance by means of a notarial public instrument in which he claims to have found some 600 works of art valued at more than 21 million euros “.

A UDEF report states that many of these works measure more than 2 meters in height, some even reaching up to 10 meters, which is why the lawyer asks “How could 600 sculptures remain forgotten and / or lost, many of which stood out? Where were 10-meter sculptures stored for 11 years? ”

“Curiously,” he adds, 96 of the 98 works acquired by the IVAM from José Luis Rueda appear in said addendum, 51 of which did not exist at the time of making the addition as they were executed after 2007 “.

One of them is ‘The three graces’, which in its original appearance was made of wood, porcelain and much smaller. The son of Gerardo Rueda, modified dozens of works of art and passed them off as originals. So that later, Consuelo Císcar, would sign two sales contracts: a total of 98 works between sold and donated, of which 13 of them never existed and 44 were never executed by Gerardo Rueda.

“We are,” he adds, “before a new ruse by José Luis Rueda to give a false patina of originality to the works that he transmitted to the IVAM; And as in the rest of the actions, there is evidence of a deliberate omission by the museum management and the Economic Management subdirectorate, who never verified the ownership of the works that the museum acquired, when all the indications indicated that they could be non-original works , of doubtful origin and of no interest to the IVAM “.

In fact, one of the works that the sculptor’s son offers to the IVAM as an original in 2004 It had been donated to the Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2002.

Both the Prosecutor’s Office and the Generalitat’s Legal Profession claim for the accused – a former high-ranking official with the PP governments and wife of former minister Rafael Blasco, convicted of the Cooperation case- six years in prison and a fine of 144,000 euros. In a subsidiary way, the Generalitat lawyer claims that the three defendants are considered authors of a crime of fraud.

For Juan Carlos Lledó the prosecutor claims five and a half years in prison and a fine of 63,000 euros and for José Luis Rueda a five-year sentence.

In terms of civil liability, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor claims the three defendants compensation of 3,456,876 euros, which must be paid jointly and severally.

This amount rises to 4,176,868 in the indictment filed by the Generalitat Lawyers’ Office.