The ex-aide, Vilma Bautista, a smallish woman who sported a bamboo cane and oversize glasses at the trial, was accused of conspiring with two nephews to sell four valuable paintings that Mrs. Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines, bought in the 1970s. The paintings disappeared from an Upper East Side townhouse used by Mrs. Marcos shortly before Ferdinand Marcos was ousted in the mid-1980s.
Prosecutors say Ms. Bautista secretly kept the works for a quarter of a century, then, when she was running short of money, tried to sell them on the black market in July 2009 through her two nephews, even though some of the paintings were being sought by the Philippine government. Emails between the nephews outline their plans to sell the paintings.
A London gallery, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, eventually agreed to sell the most valuable of the paintings, Claude Monet’s “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas” (1899) from his waterlily series, and Alan Howard, a billionaire hedge fund manager in Switzerland, agreed to pay $ 32 million for the masterpiece.
Ms. Bautista was not present for the verdict, which came after only three hours of deliberations. During the prosecution’s closing arguments on Friday morning, Ms. Bautista was wheeled out of court after experiencing chest pains and nausea.
A juror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the jury “agreed that the evidence was damning. It was just good evidence.”
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=17556
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