Part 4: Property exported from occupied territory Section 17: Offence of dealing in unlawfully exported cultural property
Subsection (1) makes it an offence to deal in cultural property which has been unlawfully exported from occupied territory, if the perpetrator either knew or had reason to suspect that the cultural property concerned had been unlawfully exported.
	Subsection (2) ensures that an offence is only committed where the property concerned is imported into the United Kingdom after the commencement of this section. No offence will be committed in relation to cultural property which is not imported into the United Kingdom.
	Subsections (3), (4) and (5) define "dealing" for the purpose of this section, identifying each of the activities which may result in the commission of an offence. Subsection (3)(b) and (c) provide for activities where a person may not have directly dealt with the unlawfully exported cultural property themselves. An example under subsection 3(c)would be where an antiquities dealer Y makes arrangements for a statue (which is cultural property) to be sold at auction, knowing that it is unlawfully exported, Y will be guilty of an offence, even if he or she does not actually "acquire" or "dispose" of the statue at any point themselves.
	Under subsections (6), (7) and (8), the offence is triable either in the crown court or the magistrates’ court. These subsections set out the maximum penalties following conviction in either the crown court or magistrates’ court.
	A dealer does not commit an offence under this section if, for example, they take temporary possession of a cultural object to enable them to carry out due diligence, or provide a valuation, only for them to discover that it has been unlawfully exported from an occupied territory. In such a scenario, the dealer could not be said to have 'acquired' the object, and therefore no dealing has taken place. They would also have lacked the requisite mental element or "mens rea" to commit the offence. In order to commit an offence in this context, a dealer would have to both "acquire" the object i.e. buy, hire, borrow or accept, and do so knowing, or having reason to suspect that it is unlawfully exported.