Belgian student strikes gold worth €9m while digging sewers

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, he stumbled across a hidden trove of gold worth an estimated €9m (£8m).

“We suddenly saw something lying there,” 18-year-old 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.”

The student, who has not been further identified, was working with colleagues on the site of a former brewery on Van Langenhovestraat in Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, about 19 miles (30km) north-west of Brussels, when they made the discovery on Tuesday.

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.

Kobe said: “It’s just not something you expect when you’re working on a regular Tuesday morning,” adding that the treasure trove appeared to have been deliberately hidden. “It was really bricked in there – not in a safe or anything.”

Brewing 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.

Hanne 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.”

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.”