José “Joe” Berardo, Portugal’s top art collector and the founder of Lisbon’s Museu Coleção Berardo, was arrested June 29 on fraud and money-laundering charges stemming from allegations that he moved high-value artworks into a trust in order to protect them from creditors. The seventy-six-year-old business tycoon was hauled in during a police sweep of more than fifty residences and businesses and is expected to appear in court within forty-eight hours of his arrest.

Police are looking into “an economic group” that allegedly breached contracts with the CGD, as well as two other financial institutions, Novo Banco and Portuguese Commercial Bank. The three banks filed a joint lawsuit in 2019, claiming losses of a billion euros ($1.2 billion).

The CGD lost €439 million ($521 million), according to the allegations. Berardo also faced trouble in 2019, when the collection of his Museu Coleção Berardo was handed over to the three banks to offset their losses. Until the, his artworks were formally owned by a company called the Berardo Collection Association.

The museum collection, which opened to the public in 2006, includes 1,000 works by 500 modern and contemporary artists, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Cindy Sherman, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. After an agreement Berardo signed with the Portuguese government in 2006, he lent works from his collection to be shown in Lisbon, where some of them remain. The agreement remains in force until 2022.

In May 2019, Berardo told the Portuguese parliament that he had accrued no personal debt, having borrowed the funds in the names of three separate holding companies, and was reported to have burst into laughter at the suggestion that banks might seize art from the museum’s 900-piece collection, which he had put up as collateral in order to secure the loans. A few months later, the banks seized the entire collection and handed over the safeguarding of the works to the state. The museum has since continued to operate and was recently named one of the hundred most visited museums in the world in 2020.