Russian Mafia Tries to Cash in on Lost Rubens

Germany was last night demanding the return from Moscow of a priceless Rubens oil painting which vanished at the end of the second world war, possibly from the home of Joseph Goebbels, only to reappear almost 60 years later in the hands of the Russian mafia.

The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is to press for the return of the painting when he travels to Russia next month for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

The work, Tarquin and Lucretia, was painted by Peter Paul Rubens between 1609 and 1612, and is widely acknowledged as one of the Flemish master's finest early works. "It's an extremely important painting," Werner Busch, a senior art historian at Berlin's Free University, said last night.

The huge canvas, depicting the mythological rape of the chaste Roman wife, Lucretia, disappeared from a castle on the outskirts of Berlin in 1945 as the Red Army advanced on the German capital.

This year a dubious consortium of Russian businessmen emailed a photograph of the picture anonymously to a German art expert, Gerd Bartoschek. They wanted to sell it. The painting was badly damaged and had clearly been rolled up. But it appeared to be genuine and worth, according to some estimates, as much as £50m.

Mr Bartoschek, the director of the Potsdam gallery where the painting had hung until 1942, immediately alerted the German police. But he also offered to send a team to Moscow to confirm the painting's authenticity.

In June, the Russian gang agreed, and two German art historians set off for Moscow. After several telephone calls, they were driven to a private house in the east of the city and shown into a room locked with a reinforced door. There the gang pulled off a white sheet to reveal the 1.87-metre by 2.14-metre painting

Unlike many lesser works, the painting had a well-documented history: Frederick the Great bought it in 1765 for his collection. The experts were able to compare it with the last black and white photograph of the painting. They agreed. It was the missing Rubens.

"It is an important work, a great work. The problem is that it is badly damaged. It is depressing to see what has happened to it," Professor Busch said. "The painting will have to be restored."

Bargaining chip

"It is a good picture," Julian Radcliffe, director of the Art Loss Register in London, added. "The problem is that for everything that was taken by the Russians from Germany, there were a number of things taken from Russia by Germany, which the Russians never got back.

"It is true that the Russians have got more of the German stuff. The Russians have always considered this to be a bargaining chip. There have been lots of negotiations. But things have moved very slowly."

The two countries are still discussing the return of thousands of works of art stolen by both armies during the war, but many Russian MPs are unwilling to give anything back.

The German police traced the original email to a financial services firm in Switzerland. Swiss detectives then arrested two people, one Swiss and one Italian, but they turned out to be middlemen.

The painting's real owners, meanwhile, told the German experts that the painting had been shifted in the last months of the war from a castle in Rheinsberg, on the outskirts of Berlin, to the nearby country retreat of the Nazi's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.

On April 25 1945, the Soviet 61st army captured the house in the village of Bogensee. A Russian officer discovered the picture and smuggled it back to Moscow.

Decades later the officer's family sold it for $800 and it came into the possession of a group of Russian businessmen, the German experts were told.

According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, the return of the picture is the subject of negotiations between Mr Schröder and Mr Putin. The Russian authorities have promised to seize the painting - but there are lingering suspicions that the Rubens gang may have links with the Moscow police and the former KGB.

Last night a spokeswoman for the German foreign ministry said the painting had not yet been recovered. "We are expecting a telephone call any minute saying that the Russian police have got the Rubens back," a spokeswoman for the German police in Brandenburg added.

"This is not just a criminal matter, it is a political one," she said. "This is a piece of bounty art."

Treasures that have vanished

The Art Loss Register says these are among the most valuable missing works:

Jan Vermeer The Concert

Stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

Rembrandt van Rijn The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

Taken in the same raid

Jean Baptiste Oudry The White Duck - Still Life

Stolen in 1992 from an estate in Norfolk

Gustav Klimt Portrait of a Woman

Stolen from a gallery in Piacenza, Italy, in 1997

Jan and Hubert van Eyck The Just Judges Panel from the Ghent Altarpiece, St Bavo, Ghent.

Stolen in 1934; not seen since

Pablo Picasso Head of a Woman (Dora Maar)

Stolen from a yacht in Antibes in March 1999

Vincent van Gogh Flowers in an Earthenware Jug

Believed to have been confiscated from a chateau in the Dordogne in 1944

Henri Matisse Still Life with a book, oil lamp and copper tray

Stolen from the Musée Matisse in Nice in June 1999

Rembrandt van Rijn Boy with a Soap Bubble

Stolen from a small municipal museum in the town of Draguignan, Provence, in July 1999

Raphael Portrait of a Young Man

Formerly in the collection of the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, lost during the second world war

Paul Cézanne Auvers sur Oise

Stolen from the Ashmolean Museum on January 31 1999