Law, crime and regulation

The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent had a double celebration today when it welcomed home a vase by master potter Josiah Wedgwood and launched a fundraising campaign to buy the Leekfrith Iron Age Torcs.

An art dealer has been jailed for the theft of £500,000 worth of paintings.

A Poundland notebook helped convict a fraudster attempting to sell fake antiques through auction houses in London and Essex.

The boyfriend of the late silver dealer Robyn Mercer who was murdered in March last year has appeared in court charged with forging her will.

A sculpture of Queen Victoria by Alfred Gilbert has been temporarily barred from leaving the country while the government searches for a buyer based in the UK to pay the £1.2m asking price.

Richard Ellis, a former Metropolitan Police officer, used the platform of The Art Business Conference to call for the restatement of the art and antiques crime unit today.

Culture Minister John Glen has placed a temporary export bar on a Scottish two-part seal matrix linked with Robert the Bruce.

A 6ft high peacock sculpture by artist Geoffrey Dashwood has been stolen from a garden in the New Forest.

A man from Sunderland who forged the work of local artist Norman Cornish (1919-2014) has been ordered to repay £1.

A $160m (£136m) masterpiece by Dutch-American abstract-impressionist painter Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) that had been stolen from a US museum 30 years ago has been discovered in an antiques shop.

Mayfair art agent Timothy Sammons is facing a fresh legal battle over the sale of paintings and could face extradition to the US.