involvement in the partnership, and his assertion that all Christo's assets were his by right of inheritance, the Papadimitriou family determined to pursue the matter at any cost. Christo's nephew Dimitri Papadimitriou coordinated a massive effort to bring Symes to justice, spending a reported US$16 million on private investigators and legal fees in order to prove his legal claim to half of the Robin Symes Limited assets, a legal case Papadimitriou eventually won and which pushed Symes into bankruptcy, resulting in his conviction on 21 January 2005. Symes was found guilty of contempt after it was determined that he had deliberately lied to the court in order to conceal the extent and value of his collection, estimated to be worth at least £125 million. Symes was also found to have systematically under-reported the size of the payments he received from wealthy clients - he testified in court that he had sold an Egyptian statue of the Greek god Apollo to an Arab sheikh for £1.1 million, when in fact the sheikh had paid Symes £3.1 million. Another Egyptian statue, supposedly sold for £2.5 million, in fact went for £5.5 million, and Symes also claimed to have sold some art deco furniture for £2.8 million, when in reality it sold for £9.7 million. Symes claimed to have assets stored in only four facilities, but investigations proved that he had secreted his vast collection across some 29 storage facilities in London, New York and Switzerland, and much of this material is now thought to have been looted from archaeological sites in Italy and other locations by gangs of tombaroli (tomb robbers) affiliated with the now-notorious Italian 'art dealer' Giacomo Medici. The gangs of tombaroli looted tombs and other archaeological sites, as well as stealing other valuable antiquities from poorly-guarded museums and private collections. These were sold on to Medici and his fellow dealers, who then created false "paper trails" by arranging for the looted objects to be cleaned and restored. Medici and his associates then 'laundered' the objects through established dealers, including Symes and Robert E. Hecht, who then sold the artefacts on, at a vast profit, to major museums and wealthy private collectors. In January 2016, officers from the art crimes squad of the Italian carabinieri, working in collaboration with Swiss authorities, raided a storage unit that Symes rented at the Geneva Freeport in Switzerland. It was found to contain a