Officials seize shoes, jackets made of endangered species at chic Amsterdam store

Photo: NVWA.nl

Government inspectors have removed 105 articles of clothing from shop in Amsterdam’s exclusive PC Hooftstraat because they include leather made from protected species, the Volkskrant said on Friday.

The shop, Karmaloog, opened earlier this year. It generated headlines because of the owners’ boast that it would be ‘the most exclusive and expensive’ shop in the Netherlands with jackets costing €100,000.

The items taken by officials include shoes, jackets, belts, skirts and other accessories made of crocodile, python and anaconda leather.

The paper says officials first became suspicious last year when a consignment of skins turned up at Schiphol airport with problematic paperwork. The package came from Thailand and contained the skins of 12 Siamese crocodiles.

Cites

Leather from protected species may only be traded in line with the international Cites treaty. Officials visited the shop in March and gave the owners three months to come up with documents showing the skins had been obtained in line with Cites rules.

However, they only managed to come up with documents for five pairs of shoes, the paper said.

Although the shop is not named in the official documents, the Volkskrant says one of the pairs of shoes in photographs supplied to the press – green python leather slip-ons – is identical to those advertised on the Karmaloog website.

Owner Nezir Yozgat told the paper in a reaction: ‘all our items are certified and all our products are legal. We will fight every ruling.’

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