Galerie Jen-Art Potential Fraud Mont Royal Quebec

Harold Sendel, of Galerie Jen-Art, left a phone message for me inquiring if I was the correct person that purchased a Peter Max print from Concord in 2001. And if so did I still have it, because he had a buyer who has offered $8325 for the piece.

After a few tries we finally connect by phone. He told me that he had just started with Jen-Art and he had been with Galerie Concord for 20 years as the manager of sales. Concord was the original company that I had bought Peter Max piece from in 2001. He informed me that the Concord representative I had worked with had left Concord several years ago at which time my account had been turned over to him, although we had never talked.

He said he had a buyer from Dubai who had placed a "Confirmed Offer" of $8325 for the piece even thou the piece was worth maybe half this amount. I told him that of course I was interested in selling it at that price. And this is where it got tricky.

His new company, Jen-Art, would not deal with non-clients (that would be me) thus I would need to buy something from them to become a client. But .... they had a policy that they only dealt in high end paintings, $10,000 or more.

He said he had a real dilemma: he had a buyer and a piece that he needed to get together so he had this idea. If I could sell the Peter Max through him I would have the $8325 to apply to higher end piece that I could buy from them but it needed to be something that I could sell very quickly for a profit. And he had just the piece.

He had represented City Bank Group and had been retained to purchase $320,000 of artwork for a major remodel project at one of their corporate headquarters. They had put 50% down for the pieces, but due to the publicity of Bank Bailout they had cancelled their order and had to forfeit the $165,000 investment.

One of the pieces he had in this City Bank group was a piece by Luis Sottil, "Captivating Harmony". It was an original mixed media piece that he had painted for Disney, but they did not use this piece. This piece was listed at $34,000, but he had gotten it for $27,400 and half of that had already be paid for by City Bank. Thus the piece could be had for $13,700. If I sold the Max at $8325 I would only need to come up with $5375. And the best part was that there was an international auction in Paris in January or February and the piece could easily bring $31,000.

I told him this sounded too good to be true and I would look at the piece on the internet and let him know.

During this internet investigation of "Luis Sottil", I confirmed the existence of the "Captivating Harmony" piece and an asking price of $37,000. I also came upon this site "Rip Off Report" and found several references to Jen-Art. The complaint reports I found posted on this site are variations of the exact offer or scam presented to me from Harold Sendel.

There is definitely a connection between Concord and Jen-Art. How can Jen-Art have all of this private information from Concord? Either Concord is involved or they also are victims of Jen-Art's scam. And what of the reputation of the artist, Luis Sottil? I would assume he would like to know that fakes of his work are being sold to the public.

This group should be turned over to the authorities and prosecuted!