Money Down The Drain: Student Finds $10 Million in Gold Bars Whilst Digging a Sewer
- 1 day ago
- 1 min read
For an 18-year-old student with a summer job working on a Belgian building site, “money down the drain” has taken on a whole new meaning.
While excavating the trenches for a new sewage system on the site of a former brewery near Brussels, he stumbled across a hidden trove of gold worth an estimated €9m. The hoard, which includes gold coins, nuggets and numbered bullion bars, was stashed in a bag in a bricked-in cellar wall beneath the grand villa originally built for the brewery’s owner, Theophilus Van Assche, in the late 19th century.
The student and his colleagues called the police as soon as they came across the gold hoard. The treasure has since been transferred to a secure facility in Brussels pending a detailed official investigation to establish its legal ownership. Authorities must now verify that the bullion was not stolen property or the proceeds of criminal activity. But, what then?
Experts think that the hoard is likely to spark a complex civil dispute about who gets their hands on the proceeds of the find. Involving, at the very least, the building contractors, the developers of the villa and any descendants of the once-wealthy Van Assche family. They could all have a claim to part of the fortune and Belgian law requires finders to wait at least five years for potential owners to claim any treasure.
The student and his trench-digging colleagues appear to be sanguine about the chances of sharing in the gold, “but maybe we’ll get some kind of finder’s reward eventually.”
