Asking for evidence is not an attempt to make you look like an idiot, not was that my intention.

There's been an argument going on VOAT for a quite a while that art prices are only high SOLEY because it's actually intended as a cover up for payments for illicit activity. This probably would be less money laundering than fraud. Your post makes it clear that there is a genuine art market and art can be USED TO STORE money, so their argument is 180 degrees off the mark.

Actually I think I made a pretty substantial criticism and undermined a common theory on this board.

As for your project, I'll talk a look, but this part seems tenuous.

ANd their ties to lobbyists NGOs etc.

Of course, people who work in politics are going to have ties to lobbyists, NGOs and others. But are they meaningful in any way? This is one of key failings of logic in this investigation.

Let's say John Doe visits prostitutes. Does that mean the people he works with know that? If they don't, connecting John Doe to them, doesn't tell you anything.

Thanks for the examples

The times article makes clear that this in not the traditional way of laundering money, but a newly developed one because the traditional ways have more and more checks against it.

Though there are no hard statistics on the amount of laundered money invested in art, law enforcements officials and scholars agree they are seeing more of it. And this is the reason I asked for examples. Because the VOAT theory doesn't play out at all in the real world. The resale value of art proves that. You can use art as collateral. If the art was just inflated due to fraudulent valuations, this wouldn't happen.

It also disproves, the idea that is pushed on VOAT that the high prices for art are artificial. Every case described there involved

A. People moving stolen money into valuable art.

B. People using valuable to art to get money past customs.

C. People lying about value of their art to avoid taxes/import duties.

In every case, people are using like they would use diamonds or real estate, inherently valuable things that you could large amounts of money to move them around.

One of money laundering cases in that Times article is non-art money laundering case involving a high stakes gambling ring being run out of Trump Tower involving Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov.

The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the “Little Taiwanese,” he was the only target to slip away, and he remains a fugitive from American justice.

Seven months after the April 2013 indictment and after Interpol issued a red notice for Tokhtakhounov, he appeared near Donald Trump in the VIP section of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

I think this is good. Because patronage of the arts has been a traditional way of laundering money and trading and trafficking illegal items and covering up bribes

Traditional? Have a single example of this tradition?