Welcome to the art market – the perfect forum to wash filthy fortunes clean Orlando Whitfield

As a small boy, every time I saw my grandfather he would remind me of his golden rule: what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not get found out. Mercifully, my grandfather didn’t live to see me become a failed art dealer (or indeed witness my former business partner, Inigo Philbrick, plead guilty to the largest art fraud in US history), but his tongue-in-cheek directive served me well for over a decade as I navigated the murky waters of the largest unregulated market in the world.

- Orlando Whitfield

The public believes that the art world is the exclusive bailiwick of blackguards and hucksters, a domain of ornate malfeasance and more dastardly billionaires than you could cram into the Oval Office on World Bitcoin Day.

For the most part, the perception of the art world is wildly off target. But unfortunately for all those honest gallerists out there toiling away, there seems to be a steady trickle of outrageous exceptions that serve to confirm the suspicion.

The latest of these bad apples is Oghenochuko Ojiri, a London-based art dealer who earlier this month received a two-and-a-half-year custodial sentence for selling almost £140,000 of art to Beirut-based Nazem Ahmad, a Lebanese-

Oghenochuko Ojiri was jailed for offences under the Terrorism Act.

Belgian diamond dealer and suspected Hezbollah financier.

From communications seized by the police in 2023, Ojiri knew that Ahmad was the subject of sanctions by the US and UK governments. (In May, Ojiri pleaded guilty to eight charges under the Terrorism Act.) He should not have been selling him so much as a packet of gum, let alone £140,000 of art. The Metropolitan police declared that this ruling should serve as a “warning to all art dealers”.