A routine plumbing job in Dendermonde took an extraordinary turn this week when construction workers drilled into a cellar wall and found it packed with gold bars and coins, reportedly worth around 9 million euros.
The crew was laying new sewage pipes in a property in East Flanders when they broke through the wall and uncovered the hidden stash. Among them was an 18 year old named Kobe, working what started out as an ordinary summer job. He told the Belgian broadcaster VRT that his first reaction was disbelief. He initially mistook the coins for ordinary one euro pieces, until a gold nugget turned up among them and made clear this was something far bigger.
The site manager, Mario, said the sheer volume of gold made keeping it quietly out of the question. There were simply too many bars and coins to hide, he told VRT, and holding onto them would have amounted to theft. Kobe put it more bluntly, saying nine million euros is not the kind of thing anyone can keep secret.
A charity's cellar, and a question of ownership
The building belongs to CAW Oost-Vlaanderen, a welfare organisation that supports people in Dendermonde, a Flemish community of around 47,000 residents. Its director, Geert Hillaert, said he reacted with surprise and amazement when he heard the news, and said he hopes the gold could eventually help fund the charity's work, given the scale of need it deals with every day.
Local police have since moved all the gold to a secure location and asked the public to stay away from the site, describing it as having been searched thoroughly for any remaining treasure. The force has even swapped its social media profile picture for an image of a gold coin, and says it hopes the discovery ends up somewhere it can genuinely change lives.
Under Belgian law, whoever the gold rightfully belongs to has up to five years to come forward and claim it. Prosecutors have opened an investigation but say it is still not clear who that might be. If nobody does step forward, and the stash is not linked to any criminal activity, the law states that treasure found hidden on someone else's property is split between the person who found it and the owner of the property, meaning both the builders and the charity could eventually see a share.