Goya has saved a mysterious defaulter from a multimillion-dollar tax debt with the Treasury of Álava, according to the newspaper El País. Specifically, 87 paintings and more than 200 engravings by the Fuendetodos artist have been delivered, all previously held by the Juan Celaya Letamendia Foundation collection.
The art set valued at 4.3 million euros The debt was handed over to the Provincial Council of Alava, thereby helping to settle the debt. In order to settle the debt, the debtor also paid cash, according to the same sources.
This is not an isolated case, since in Álava payment in kind to cancel a tax debt has been used a total of 20 times and in seven of them works of art have been used since 2001, as reported by the head of the treasury. Alava, Itziar Gonzalo.
The works of art donated become public property, they belonged to the Juan Celaya Foundation created in 2018, after the death of the businessman from Guipuzcoa in 2016. The collection is made up of four folders with more than 200 prints from the series ‘Tauromaquia’, ‘Caprichos’, ‘Los proverbios’ and ‘Los absurdes de Goya’paintings by Basque authors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as three wooden carvings from the 13th, 15th and 19th centuries. One of the most notable is the Civil War triptych by Aurelio Arteta, valued at 1.2 million euros.
According to the aforementioned newspaper, The identity of who held this great cultural heritage is unknown. The foundation, for its part, maintains that it did not have any debt with the provincial treasury. The great mystery that this unusual fact has opened is how an individual had obtained this large number of works of incalculable value, which also previously belonged to the Juan Celaya Foundation.
