In the lead up to the vote both Labour and the SNP

Mr Wolters has made no secret of the fact that he wants more evidence to charge Brückner. That is why the BKA footed the bill forin ruined farm buildings on merciless, shadeless scrubland in the rising heat of an Algarve summer.

The buildings are frequented at night by the kind of drifters and petty criminals that Brückner once was. Nearby residents told us they sometimes find looted suitcases among the ruins that have been stolen from holidaymakers.But this week's searches were not targeted on one specific building, so any intelligence they were based on was clearly quite vague.It all felt a bit like a last desperate attempt to back Mr Busching's statements with concrete, physical evidence.

In some ways this search was similar to those I have seen on previous trips. The use of shovels in the heat, digging up stone-hard ground.But the German team were mostly targeting old farm buildings. This meant they needed a large, yellow mechanical digger to break up the concrete floors and sift through the resulting rubble.

They also made extensive use of a ground-penetrating radar, slowly pushing the device across the buildings' floors, looking for anomalies and cavities underneath.

The Portuguese fire brigade helped on the first day, pumping out an old well so it could be safely searched. The officers were looking for traces of Madeleine McCann, or some of her clothing.Prosecutors allege that while the gallery itself may have been duped into first buying the fake pieces, Mr Kraemer and the gallery were "grossly negligent" in failing to sufficiently check the items' authenticity before selling them on to collectors at high prices.

In his closing arguments, prosecutor Mr Rayer said that based on Galerie Kraemer's "reputation and contacts, they could have taken the furniture to Versailles or the Louvre to compare them."They could also have hired other experts given the amounts at stake and considering the opacity on the origin of the chairs."

Speaking in court, a lawyer representing Mr Kraemer and the gallery insisted his client "is victim of the fraud, not an accomplice", stating Mr Kraemer never had direct contact with the forgers.In a statement to the BBC, lawyers Martin Reynaud and Mauricia Courrégé added: "The gallery was not an accomplice of the counterfeiters, the gallery did not know the furniture was fake, and it could not have detected it".