Brett Whiteley's former wife says three paintings that were part of Australia's biggest art fraud case are fakes while the judges who acquitted two men of forging them say they have no idea if they're real or not.
Art restorer Mohamed Aman Siddique, 68, and dealer Peter Stanley Gant, 61, were acquitted on April 27 after prosecutors conceded their convictions were unsafe.
They had been convicted of obtaining and attempting to obtain financial advantage by deception over three contested Whiteley paintings.
The Court of Appeal on Monday said its reasons for quashing their convictions do not rely on "any affirmative finding" that Whiteley created the paintings.
"To be clear, we make no such finding. Nor are we equipped to do so," Justices Mark Weinberg, Phillip Priest and Stephen McLeish said.
Mr Gant and Mr Siddique were acquitted after prosecutors conceded their grounds of appeal against conviction and admitted there was a good chance the pair might be innocent.
It's unclear what will happen to the three paintings.
Blue Lavender Bay was purchased in late 2007 by Sydney Swans chairman Andrew Pridham for $2.5 million, while Orange Lavender Bay went for $1.1 million.
A third painting, Through The Window, was listed for sale for $950,000.
Wendy Whiteley maintains her view that the paintings are fakes.
"I feel sorry for the people who bought the artworks in good faith and I feel sorry for the whole Australian art world," she told AAP on April 27.
A Victorian Supreme Court jury found Mr Gant and Mr Siddique guilty in May 2016 of faking and selling Blue Lavender Bay and Orange Lavender Bay following a four-week trial.
The pair were also found guilty of trying to sell Through The Window.
During the trial, Guy Morel gave evidence that in 2007 he took photos of what appeared to be several Brett Whiteley paintings in mid-production at Mr Siddique's Collingwood studio.
The prosecution alleged the paintings shown in Morel's photos were passed off as genuine Whiteleys produced between 1988 and 1989 and sold as such by Mr Gant.
But the Court of Appeal said once the defence was able to show the reasonable possibility the paintings existed before 2007, they effectively ended the prosecution's "narrow" and "quite specific" case.
"The Crown nailed its colours to the mast in that particular respect," the justices said.
In her closing address to the jury, prosecutor Susan Borg also suggested gallery assistant Rosemary Milburn and Jeremy James were honest witnesses who were somehow mistaken when they said they had seen Blue Lavender Bay and Orange Lavender Bay in 1988 and 1989 respectively.
"Such speculation, which the prosecutor effectively invited by the manner in which she couched her closing address to the jury, may well have contributed to the error in the jury's verdict," the appeal judges said.
