British Museum Deputy Director Leaves After Probe into Thefts
The British Museum official who bungled an investigation into thefts at the institution is now leaving after the release of an independent review, according to BBC News.
When recommendations from the review were published on Tuesday, there was no mention of deputy director Jonathan Williams. This prompted Ittai Gradel, the antiquities dealer who alerted senior museum officials to the thefts in 2021, to tell the BBC, “He should have gone long ago.”
On August 25, Williams “voluntarily stepped back” from his position until the conclusion of the museum’s external investigation. That announcement was made three hours after Hartwig Fischer resigned as director. Fischer had previously announced in July that he would be stepping away from the position in 2024.
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Gradel further commented that “this whole charade of stepping back from duties was pointless from the outset. It was immediately obvious to any observer that [Williams] had displayed incompetence in handling this on a level where the only appropriate response should be that he should lose his position.”
According to a report in the Telegraph, Gradel sent Williams a 1,600-word email in February 2021. The detailed communication identified the seller of ancient artifacts listed on eBay—a senior curator at the museum—and contended that the items were very likely from the museum archives.
On July 12, 2021, Willams replied to Gradel that an investigation had found “the objects concerned are all accounted for,” and the results of a security review found “procedures are robust and that the collection is protected.” Later the same month, Williams also claimed Gradel’s allegations were “wholly unfounded.”
Gradel eventually took his concerns to board chairman George Osborne, who later said the museum’s decision to dismiss those claims was a mistake.
The British Museum admitted this past August that 2,000 items had been lost, stolen, or damaged over the course of three decades, prompting an investigation by the Metropolitan Police and the firing of an unnamed staff member.
The items were small pieces of Greco-Roman “gold jewelry and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century” that had not been on display.
The museum did not disclose to the BBC the date of Williams’s departure, nor whether it was voluntary or the decision of management.
When asked on December 12 about whether Williams would step down, Osborne told the BBC that he would not “come to instant judgements on those sorts of things.”
“It’s absolutely clear that when the museum was warned by Dr. Gradel in 2021, the museum did not respond adequately to that warning,” Osborne told the British public broadcaster. “If we had, we would have got on top of this a couple of years before we did. There are clearly very serious consequences for it.”
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