Dishonest Dealers, Becker pianos

[Michiel van Loon]

Kristinn,
You wrote:
>we have a dealer here who passes his J. Becker pianos off as Dutch.  The
>only pianos I know of from Holland are Rippen and they went out of business
>in ´89.  The only connection these Russian-made instruments have to
>Holland, is that they´re shipped from Rotterdam to Iceland.  We believe, as
>Brian said, that the best way to tackle this is to have an unfortunate
>buyer file a fraud charge, but so far we haven´t found anyone who´s willing
>to do that.

As far as I know, when the Rippen factory in Ede Holland closed, the
inventory was moved to Saint Petersburg together with some people of the
staff. There they started making Becker pianos. I have seen those
instruments on the Musikmesse in Frankfurt and there were also some faces I
have seen on the 2 Rippen factory tours I made. So that is all what is Dutch
about Becker.
Michiel van Loon
Meppel
Holland