Gold & Silver Forum - Spanish gold horde wrangling-- from The Economist

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Spanish gold horde wrangling-- from The Economist

cool saga, I will monitor this

Quote:

When you find treasure, all and sundry promptly start to claim it

IT MAY seem a glamorous life, but the lot of a treasure-hunter is not all adventure, excitement and the dazzle of gold and jewels. Take Odyssey Marine Exploration. One of its vessels was forced into port and searched by Spanish police last week, before being released this week.
Odyssey's business is based on the notion that the ocean floor is littered with valuable old stuff that, thanks to new deep-sea technology, can now be recovered. Some evidence came in May, when it found 500,000 colonial-era silver coins and a few gold ones at a secret site that it calls Black Swan. Yet this has brought only legal headaches. Who owns the coins it whisked off to Florida after unloading the treasure in Gibraltar earlier this year? A Spanish magistrate seems to think that Odyssey may have illegally scooped them off the seabed in Spanish waters.

Odyssey denies this, but it faces claims from the Spanish government in an American court. Spain thinks the treasure may belong to it. Other �claim-jumpers�, as Odyssey's lawyers call them, may wait in the wings. Yet the firm is upbeat. Its find is good news for investors, including such funds as Fortress and GLG, after two years of losses. Even if a legitimate claimant appears, it hopes to keep 90% of the proceeds.
Step forward the lawyers for Spain. James Goold at Covington and Burling, a firm that successfully defended Spain's ownership of two frigates, Juno and La Galga, lying off Virginia, believes the mysterious Black Swan coins may be Spanish. �The owners of sunken ships have rights,� he says. �Spain has not abandoned its sunken property and it does not permit unauthorised salvage.� If Odyssey is forced to hand over a large part of its Black Swan haul a cloud will fall over all commercial treasure-hunting. Who, after all, wants to invest large amounts of money looking for something only to see a government then claim full ownership?
A similar recent case occurred in Colombia, where the supreme court came up with a confusing decision about the ownership of the wreck of the Spanish-flagged San Jos�. It awarded it, at least in part, to the Colombian government. Nationalism, politics, greed and a concern for the archaeological integrity of shipwrecks can all come into play in a big find.
What should be done? If private treasure-hunters do not seek out wrecks, nobody else will. Governments rarely take any initiative. One alternative may be to adopt a British model. The British government has just signed a deal with Odyssey to recover treasure, and then to split the proceeds, from HMS Sussex, which went down off Gibraltar in 1693, carrying a million pounds in coins. The deal also provides archaeological guarantees.
Defenders of this arrangement believe that it deals with most concerns about treasure-hunting. It settles ownership, rewards risk and initiative and helps the archaeologists. It might, indeed, be just the sort of deal that could benefit both Spain and Odyssey. Until treasure-hunters and governments start working together, every find is liable to be followed by complex legal wrangling, in which the only certain winners will be the lawyers.