whether it was the gateway for the cyber attack.

His accomplice, Mr Desnoues, was a decorated cabinetmaker and sculptor who had won a number of prestigious awards, including best sculptor in France in 1984, and had been employed as the main restorer of furniture at Versailles.Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a "joke" with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, belonging to Madame du Barry.

Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.And buoyed by their success, they started making more.Describing how they went about constructing the chairs, the two described in court how Mr Pallot sourced wood frames at various auctions for low prices, while Mr Desnoues aged wood at his workshop to make others.

They were then sent for gilding and upholstery, before Mr Desnoues added designs and a wood finish. He added stamps from some of the great furniture-workers of the 18th Century, which were either faked or taken from real furniture of the period.Once they were finished, Mr Pallot sold them through middlemen to galleries like Kraemer and one he himself worked at, Didier Aaron. They would then get sold onto auction houses such as Sotheby's of London and Drouot of Paris.

"I was the head and Desnoues was the hands," Mr Pallot told the court smilingly.

"It went like a breeze," he added. "Everything was fake but the money."But when the CPS cannot proceed to trial because police do not have the necessary evidence needed to secure a conviction - they record it in their data as an "E72".

The BBC, alongside the University of Leicester, managed to obtain Freedom of Information (FOI) requests showing the number of E72s recorded between 2020 and 2024 at police forces in England and Wales.The figures obtained by the BBC do not break down why cases have collapsed.

However, the data does suggest the number of cases recorded as an E72 are increasing, with a higher proportion of prosecutions failing to result in a conviction because of lost or missing evidence each year.In 2020, a total of 7,484 prosecutions collapsed because of lost, missing or damaged evidence. In 2024, that had risen by 9%, to 8,180.