A former employee of the Royal Coin Cabinet sold coins from the museum's collections at auction.
Now the man has been ordered to pay damages of over 1.5 million kronor, announces the Svea Court of Appeal.
The man, who is in his 50s and had free access to the museum's vaults and objects in the early 2000s, is accused of plundering the historical collections of hundreds of coins worth millions and selling them on.
He was prosecuted in 2018 for several cases of gross fraud. He claimed that he had owned all the coins for over ten years and that any crimes were therefore statute-barred.
Both the district court and the court of appeal followed the man's line and acquitted him.
The National Historical Museums, which claimed damages of four million kronor, appealed to the Supreme Court – which in March 2023 ruled that the damages issue was not statute-barred and sent the case back to the Svea Court of Appeal.
"Striking"
The court of appeal has now ruled that the man must pay damages of over 1.5 million kronor.
According to the court, it is "striking" that so many of the coins the man sold are of the same type as those missing from the museum. The damages are not higher because it is not considered proven that all the hundreds of coins actually belonged to the museum.
The man has consistently denied any wrongdoing and claimed that the coins came from inheritance or purchases from other collectors.
Inventory
Suspicions against the former employee were raised in 2015, after he submitted a nearly 200-year-old dollar coin to an auction firm.
The missing items for which the man was prosecuted are only a fraction of what is missing from the museum's collections.
Following an extensive inventory between 2013 and 2017, it was established that nearly 1,500 items, mostly coins, worth 25 million kronor were missing.
The Economic Museum – Royal Coin Cabinet is a Swedish museum for economic history.
The museum is part of the National Historical Museums authority and has activities in Swedish monetary and financial history as well as medal art.
The collections include coins and other means of payment, as well as medals and other objects related to numismatics or financial history.
The museum, one of the oldest in Sweden, was previously known only as the Royal Coin Cabinet, but changed its name in 2020, in connection with the museum's move to the same premises as the Historical Museum on Narvavägen in Stockholm. The museum was previously located on Slottsbacken in Gamla Stan, Stockholm.
The collections consist of over 600,000 objects, including 450,000 coins.
Source: Economic Museum – Royal Coin Cabinet
