British TV presenters Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, better known as Ant and Dec, have obtained a court order requiring art dealers to disclose details of transactions involving Banksy prints in their collections, as the pair try to determine whether middlemen made undisclosed profits from the transactions.
According to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a High Court judge ruled on March 4 that there was a “controversial case” in which an unnamed art consultant helped two people buy, sell and loan works from a contemporary art collection, and the transactions handled may have involved misconduct.
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According to reviewed court documents art newspaper, McPartlin and Donnelly purchased six Banksy prints through a consultant for a total of $736,000. The works come from London dealer Andrew Lilley of Lilley Fine Art Ltd., who allegedly received $401,000 from the prints, leaving a discrepancy of about $335,000 that the presenter now wants explained.
The court order will force Lilley to provide information about his dealings with the middleman, identified only as “X” in legal documents, after previous requests for disclosure were denied on confidentiality grounds.
The consultant was reportedly appointed to advise the presenters on building their collections on a 10% commission, a relationship that ended in 2021.
Lawyers for McPartlin and Donnelly told the court the pair wanted to “uncover what really happened in the transaction”, which also included the sale of a Banksy painting titled ” napalm. The presenter said they were told the piece would sell for about $15,000, but later learned it could fetch $17,400.
More broadly, presenters are seeking information related to 22 transactions related to Banksy works in their collections.
Judge Iain Pester granted the disclosure request using the Norwich Pharmacal Order, a legal mechanism that allows courts to compel third parties involved in potential wrongdoing to provide relevant information.
The dealer and his company have not been accused of wrongdoing. Lilley told the BBC he “got caught up in the mess” and believed he was buying the work at fair market value, adding that the dispute ultimately lay between the presenter and an unnamed middleman.
The case also highlights the continued demand for Banksy in the secondary market. Data from analytics platform Artdai shows the artist’s auction market has expanded dramatically over the past two decades, with an index tracking his works up more than 9,000% since the early benchmarks used by the platform. However, the market has fallen by around 27% over the past five years, suggesting that Banksy’s work has lost at least some of its popularity at auction.
