British Museum gems for sale on eBay – how a theft was exposed

“I immediately said: ‘Well, hold on, that must be linked to that email that I saw a couple of months ago,’” Mr Osborne told the BBC.

They decided to call the police immediately and Dr Higgs was suspended.

“It took us some time as an institution to accept the betrayal of trust that these thefts represented,” Dr Fischer later told the BBC. “Betrayal by an insider has been a hard lesson to learn, and hard to prepare for”.

He later resigned from his position early over the response to Dr Gradel’s allegations.

“I think it was pretty traumatic for the people who were investigating this, particularly as the scale of the thefts emerged,” said Mr Osborne.

Both Dr Higgs’ workspace and home were raided by the Metropolitan Police over the subsequent months.

According to the museum’s High Court documents, police found handwritten notes and printed instructions on editing museum records at his work, while at home they seized items believed to have come from the museum’s collections.

“I’m 100% certain we’ve got our man, we know who has stolen these items,” says Mr Osborne, “missing coins were found in his house”.

Dr Higgs has denied the coins came from the museum, stating they belonged to a dead relative.

He was finally dismissed from the museum in July 2023 – more than two years after Dr Gradel first raised the alarm.

Mr Osborne told the BBC the Danish antiques dealer had done the museum a great service, and he was sorry he had not been listened to initially.

“I hope he can look at the changes… and see that some good has come out of what has been a very sad and unfortunate series of events,” said Mr Osborne.

These include a commitment to catalogue every single item in the collections and tighten security processes, ensuring no member of staff can enter a storeroom alone.