Man sentenced in France for stealing Banksy artwork

Convicted musician claimed he was a friend of the artist who sent a 'team' to help him steal it

An image from the Pompidou Centre taken in September 2019 shows the depiction of a masked rat by British street artist Banksy on the back of a parking sign in Paris. AFP

A man was given a two-year suspended prison sentence by a court in France on Wednesday for using a lorry to steal a Banksy stencil from the back of a parking sign in Paris.

Mejdi R, 38, a musician, admitted in court that he used an angle grinder in September 2019 to remove part of the sign on which the secretive British artist had depicted a masked rat holding a box cutter.

The defendant claimed he was a friend of Banksy, who had asked him to retrieve the artwork on the sign near the modern art Centre Pompidou museum in Paris.

He said the artist wanted to prevent others from making money from the street art of “no value”, and to “denounce the hypocrisy of a capitalist system that decides which art had value and which does not”.

He said Banksy sent a “team” to help him steal it, who returned to England with the rat.

The prosecutor said a Banksy representative denied this.

The artwork is still missing.

The court also sentenced Mejdi R to a €30,000 ($32,000) fine.

He was ordered to pay more than €6,500 in damages to the Centre Pompidou, which the court determined to be the stolen asset's custodian.

Mejdi R said he had not stolen a cultural asset but taken part in “degrading a metal plate”, referring to sign for the Pompidou's car park.

Banksy blitzed the French capital with murals in 2018, and appeared to authenticate the rat with the box cutter on his Instagram page that year.

The Pompidou theft came seven months after another Banksy work, paying homage to the victims of the November 2015 attacks in Paris, was stolen from outside the Bataclan, the concert venue where ISIS gunmen murdered 90 people.

A French court in 2022 sentenced eight men to punishments ranging from a six-month suspended sentence to two years behind bars for stealing that work and taking it to Italy.

Investigators found it on a farm.