In 2000 alone, the Metropolitan police seized suspect artefacts worth £22m in raids.The new Bill will seek to curb this trade by punishing those who have been willing to handle the pieces, as well as those who remove them. But it will also clamp down on amateur archaeologists who scour the British countryside in search of buried treasure.The list of priceless treasures that have changed hands through shady London dealerships in recent years is astonishing. Among the most extraordinary was a series of reliefs removed from walls in the ancient city of Nineveh in what is now Iraq and a consignment of 2,500 pieces comprising coins, jewellery, silver daggers and tiles, the product of the Buddhist Gandaharan civilisation that once ruled Afghanistan.Nigerian treasures have also surfaced with alarming frequency: three years ago, black market dealerships were flooded with looted tribal crowns, carvings and terracotta sculptures.The proposed new Cultural Properties (Offences) Act – introduced in the form of a private members’ bill – has the full backing of the Government. It was drafted with the help of Britain’s foremost archaeologists.Tony Robinson, presenter of the long-running Channel 4 archaeology series Time Team, welcomed it as an attempt to solve “the problem of providing the historical environment with the same protection we now offer the natural one”.But he said last night the historic inadequacy of the UK’s anti-looting laws meant many British people were genuinely ignorant of the damage they were doing when they scoured the earth with metal detectors and removed artefacts from the ground. “Any new law needs to be robust but we should make sure it is accompanied by improved education to explain to people why it is there.”Perhaps the most looted site in Britain is the “Snettisham hoard”, a buried treasure trove of Celtic coins, gemstones, torcs and pottery uncovered in Norfolk in the 1980s.Until now, British courts have had only limited powers to punish treasure-hunters. Those who fail to report items found on Crown land can be fined, while vandals who damage monuments can be jailed for up to two years.But little action has been taken to stem the flow of illegally traded artefacts by cracking down on the dealers who buy and sell them. The Bill will change this by making it a criminal offence to acquire or dispose of any object stolen from a scheduled historical site – whether at home or overseas.Richard Allan, the Liberal Democrat MP who is introducing it, said: “There’s a notion in other countries that all archaeological remains are the property of the state, but we don’t have that here.

This Bill will hopefully change that.”A spokeswoman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said the new Bill was aimed at “professional grave-robbers” and dealers who accepted suspicious artefacts. She said: “From now on, they will have no excuse not to check the provenance of everything they are offered if they have any doubt about its origin They can be sure that the law is after them if they don’t.”. Eleven years after the Italian state was shaken to its foundations by the Tangentopoli – “Bribesville” – scandal, another story of bribery and corruption has hit the headlines, this time involving Italy’s enormous, celebrated network of autostrade, or motorways. But high officials within Anas, the state monopoly responsible for building and maintaining Italy’s motorways, have been arrested, along with more than two dozen motorway contractors, charged with conspiring to defraud the public of huge sums by rigging bids for construction work, staging fake natural disasters to create unnecessary repair tasks and other scams.An inquiry has so far resulted in 31 arrests of businessmen and directors, officers and employees of the Milan, Turin and Palermo branches of Anas. It is alleged that the Anas employees took bribes amounting to millions of euros and also received presents such as computers and mobile phones. It is claimed that the last bribe, €5,000 (£3,300) in cash, was paid last Tuesday.The scam was cooked up by corrupt Anas officials and, in the words of Colonel Giuseppe Rositani of the Carabiniere, “a cartel of 27 contractors who chose the road of non-belligerence, sharing out contracts among themselves with the connivance of their friends in Anas and reaching agreements to share the profits, starting from the tender stage”.The most brazen aspect consisted of faking natural calamities on the motorways, then sending emergency crews to fix them.

The police give an example of state highway 42 in Breschiano, Lombardy, last November, when the region saw very heavy rain. A number of those charged decided this was an opportune moment to fabricate a landslide, which they did with the help of a lorry-load of stones.If a new length of highway was deemed too short to bring in the sort of money the racketeers were looking for, they fixed the documents to make it appear 10 or 20 miles longer. And if a contractor with the job of installing lights along the highway wanted to trim his costs a little, he simply failed to put any in– plunging the highway into darkness.The corrupt Anas officials received 5 per cent of the value of the contracts, police say. Investigators were able secretly to film some of the bribes being handed over. In one such video, an Anas official tells a contractor to place the money in the bath tub.