In Belgium, a student while digging a sewer found a treasure trove of gold worth € 9 million. This is reported by The Guardian.
"For a student with a summer job at a Belgian construction site, "money into the sewer" has acquired a completely new meaning: while digging trenches for the sewer system, he stumbled upon a treasure trove of gold worth approximately € 9 million," the publication says.
18-year-old Kobe told the Belgian news channel VTM about the discovery.
"At first I thought they were 1 euro coins. So we started digging them up. Then we saw a gold bar. It turned out that this is a little more than we thought," he said.
According to the student, he worked with colleagues at the site of a former brewery in Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, about 30 km northwest of Brussels. They stumbled upon the treasure on Tuesday. The treasure, which contained gold coins, nuggets and numbered ingots, was in a bag in the brick wall of the basement under a large villa originally built for the owner of the brewery, Theophil Van Assche, at the end of the XIX century.
Brewing on this site began in 1899 and stopped in 1970, and the protected area — the wrought—iron gates of which still have the initials "VA" - is being completely reconstructed by the social organization CAW Oost-Vlaanderen to create new offices and residential buildings.
Kobi and his colleagues called the police and immediately reported the discovery as soon as they discovered the gold. The treasure was transferred to a protected institution in Brussels before conducting an official investigation to establish the legal ownership.
The authorities should first check that the ingots were not stolen property or proceeds of criminal activity and could provoke a complex civil dispute, explained Hanne Ollevier, an employee of the prosecutor's office of East Flanders.
Construction contractors, a charitable organization and any descendants of the once wealthy Van Assche family can claim part of the fortune. According to Belgian law, potential owners will be able to receive the treasure no earlier than in five years.
According to Kobi, he and his colleagues immediately realized that they needed to hand over such a large find to the authorities. "If it was a few coins, maybe not. But maybe someday we will get some kind of reward for the find," he added.
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