JEWELS WORTH €7 million, reported stolen by the wife of the United States ambassador to the Netherlands six years ago, have been handed to police by a hotel cleaner and returned to the US – raising doubts about whether there ever was a theft.
The disappearance of the stones sparked a major police investigation in 2006 when it was reported by Dawn Arnall, wife of the late Roland Arnall, billionaire businessman and co-founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, who had been appointed ambassador by President George W Bush months previously.
The story, as told by the cleaner, is extraordinary. She says she found the jewels in the lounge of the luxury hotel in The Hague where she works, admired them but assumed they were costume jewellery. Then she handed them in to the hotel’s lost-and-found department.
Six months later, and following a police investigation, the hotel authorities, who also decided the stones were probably paste, told the cleaner they had not been claimed and she could take them home.
The cleaner did so, threw them in a drawer and forgot all about them until the end of last year, when she came across them again, and, out of curiosity, brought them to a jeweller to be valued.
Once their enormous value and rarity was established, she handed them to the police, who immediately made the connection with the Arnall robbery, or alleged robbery – which, of course, had remained unsolved.
Neither the cleaner nor the hotel has been named by police, who have confirmed, however, that the jewels have been returned to Mrs Arnall in Los Angeles. She’s believed in the meantime to have received a substantial insurance payout of perhaps as much as €3 million.
Sources close to the police said that although the cleaner had been hoping for a 10 per cent finder’s fee, there had so far been no acknowledgment from Mrs Arnall, a staunch Republican and major campaign contributor who co-chaired the 2004 Republican Convention.
And because the insurance company was located outside the Netherlands, they said there appeared to be no legal obligation on the company to pay the cleaner any reward at all.
Mr Arnall died of cancer in March 2008, aged 68, shortly after he cut short his term of office in The Hague and returned to the US to help care for his son, who suffered from Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
He was a controversial choice as ambassador to the Netherlands because of his ownership of ACC Capital Holdings, the parent company of Ameriquest, the largest subprime mortgage lender in the US until 2007.