Belgian student Kobe thought he had found €1 coins while digging a sewer; the hidden stash turned out to be gold worth about €9 million
For a student with a summer job working on a Belgian building site, “money down the drain” has taken on a whole new meaning. Excavating the trenches for a sewage system, 18-year-old Kobe stumbled across a hidden trove of gold worth an estimated €9 million (£8 million). According to a report by The Guardian, the discovery was made on the site of a former brewery in Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, about 19 miles north-west of Brussels. What began as a routine Tuesday morning quickly turned into one of the most remarkable treasure finds in recent Belgian history.A shocking discovery“We suddenly saw something lying there,” Kobe told the Belgian news network VTM. “At first I thought it was €1 coins. So we started digging them up. Then we saw a gold bar. It turned out to be a bit more than we thought.”Kobe and his colleagues were working on the site of a former brewery on Van Langenhovestraat when they made the discovery. 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.“It’s just not something you expect when you’re working on a regular Tuesday morning,” Kobe said, adding that the treasure trove appeared to have been deliberately hidden, as per the report. “It was really bricked in there – not in a safe or anything.”A historic propertyBrewing on the site began in 1899 and ceased in 1970, and the listed property, the wrought-iron gates of which still bear the initials “VA”, is being completely renovated by the social welfare organisation CAW Oost-Vlaanderen to create new offices and housing.“The Brouwershuis was a beautiful building, but it is being completely gutted,” Geert Hillaert, of CAW, told the news outlet HLN. “Ultimately, only the walls will remain. Labourers were laying drainage pipes when they stumbled across the gold.”Kobe and his colleagues called the police and notified CAW 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.A complex legal questionHanne Ollevier, of the East Flanders public prosecutor’s office, told HLN that authorities must first verify that the bullion was not stolen property or the proceeds of criminal activity, and was likely to spark a complex civil dispute.The building contractors, the welfare organisation and any descendants of the once-wealthy Van Assche family could all have a claim to part of the fortune. Belgian law requires finders to wait at least five years for potential owners to claim any treasure.A former mayor of Dendermonde, Piet Buyse, told HLN that the Van Assche’s fortune had “certainly stayed in the family. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they had decided to put at least some of it in gold, and then to hide it in a safe place.”A finder’s reward?For his part, Kobe said he and his colleagues had understood straight away that they had to hand over such a big find. “If it had been a few coins, maybe not,” he said. “But maybe we’ll get some kind of finder’s reward eventually.”Under Belgian law, if no rightful owner comes forward within five years, the treasure can be divided between the finder and the property owner, provided it is not associated with a crime.A once-in-a-lifetime findThe discovery has captured the imagination of people across Belgium and beyond. For Kobe, it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that has turned an ordinary summer job into an extraordinary story.“We kept unearthing more coins and bars. It was only then that it really sank in what we’d found. It was a strange feeling,” he said.For now, the gold remains in secure storage while investigators work to determine its origin and ownership. But for Kobe and his colleagues, the memory of that Tuesday morning will last a lifetime.
