Belgium student unearths ₹99-crore gold stash during routine sewer work under former brewery. But he can’t keep it

Summer Shift Turns Up €9 Million in Gold Beneath a Belgian Brewery Ruin

Theindiapostdaily.com – An 18-year-old construction worker named Kobe was laying drainage pipes for a sewage trench on an ordinary Tuesday morning when his crew broke through into something no one expected: a sealed cavity inside a cellar wall packed with gold coins, nuggets, and numbered bullion bars. The haul, estimated at roughly €9 million (approximately ₹99 crore), had been bricked shut beneath a large villa in Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, a town sitting about 30 km northwest of Brussels.

“At first I thought it was €1 coins,” Kobe recalled to Belgian broadcaster VTM. “It’s just not something you expect when you’re working on a regular Tuesday morning.”

The Site: A Century-Old Brewery Undergoing Renovation

The excavation took place on Van Langenhovestraat, where a brewery first opened its doors in 1899 and ceased production in 1970. The heritage-listed structure — still bearing the initials “VA” on its wrought-iron gates — was originally built in the late 1800s for Theophilus Van Assche, the family that owned the brewing operation. Social welfare organisation CAW Oost-Vlaanderen is now gutting the building to convert it into office space and residential units.

Geert Hillaert of CAW confirmed the scale of the overhaul to HLN:

“The Brouwershuis was a beautiful building, but it is being completely gutted. Ultimately, only the walls will remain. Labourers were laying drainage pipes when they stumbled across the gold.”

What Was Found and Where It Sits Now

The concealed trove consisted of gold coins, raw nuggets, and serially numbered bullion bars bundled together in a bag and sealed within a section of the cellar wall. Kobe described the hiding method plainly:

“It was really bricked in there – not in a safe or anything.”

After the find, Kobe and his co-workers alerted police and notified CAW immediately. The gold has since been transported to a secure facility in Brussels, where it will stay pending an investigation into its provenance and legal ownership.

Belgian Law and the Ownership Question

Under Belgian statute, a person who uncovers buried treasure does not automatically become its owner. Anyone discovering such a hoard must wait at least five years to give potential rightful owners time to come forward. Hanne Ollevier of the East Flanders public prosecutor’s office said investigators would first determine whether the bullion had been stolen or linked to any criminal activity, noting that resolving ownership could spiral into a protracted civil dispute.

Potential claimants include the construction firm on site, CAW Oost-Vlaanderen itself, and possible heirs of the once-wealthy Van Assche family. Former Dendermonde mayor Piet Buyse told HLN that the fortune had “certainly stayed in the family,” adding it would not surprise him if the family had converted at least part of their wealth into gold and hidden it away.

Kobe said his crew recognised immediately that a find of such magnitude had to go to the authorities. He acknowledged they might have been tempted to pocket a few coins, but the sheer scale of the stash made that unthinkable. The teenager added only that he and his colleagues hoped to receive some form of “finder’s reward eventually.”