Court of Appeal in Rio de Janeiro orders former director of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro Fabio Szwarcwald to pay the museum 100,000 reais for disclosing that it had gone 16 years without fire insurance

Szwarcwald ran the museum from 2020 to 2022 and left soon after his public statement. Insurance and other major expenditure are the responsibility of the museum's board, so this is in effect a story of a confrontation between a salaried director, who had embarked on modernisation, and his employer in the person of a board that had economised on insurance for 16 years. And all this in the knowledge that in 1978 MAM Rio had already suffered a serious fire, in which around six hundred works of art perished.

The court ruled that even if what was said about the insurance is true, Szwarcwald breached the confidentiality clause of his contract and damaged the museum's reputation in the eyes of trustees, artists and the public.

Fortunately, the court also obliged the museum, at the very least, to pay the former director his withheld salary for almost a year.