Figure of the month: 2,420,000
News Arnulf Hinkel, financial journalist – 01.01.2025
Remarkable gold discoveries by private individuals who are not so much soldiers of fortune as lucky devils, usually occur where most gold deposits are located – for example in Australia, South Africa or the United States. In September 2018, for example, Henry Dole, a lucky Canadian, discovered a gold nugget weighing almost 90 kg with a purity of 95 per cent – the largest gold nugget find to date. However, a plumber in Austria recently proved that it is also possible to find a real gold treasure in areas that have no gold deposits whatsoever.
Missed opportunities and lucky devils
In an old villa in Vienna’s Penzing district in November 2024, renovations called for basement walls to be opened up. One of the construction workers noticed a rope sticking straight out of the concrete. The worker was obviously not overly curious, as he did not pursue the mystery of the rope embedded in the concrete any further. If only he had – a much more inquisitive plumber, who was on site the next day and made the same discovery, uncovered the rope and found a metal box set in concrete at its end. Naturally, he opened it – and found a treasure.
30 kg of gold coins with a purity of 99.9 per cent
What the curious plumber saw left him speechless: the box contained gold coins with a total weight of around 30 kg. As these were so-called Mozart coins, their total weight corresponded to the weight of the gold they contained, as Mozart coins have a purity of 999/1000, i.e. they are made of pure gold. At the current gold price (as of 20 December 20024) of €80.67 per gram, the find is therefore worth over €2.4 million.
Whether the original owners of the gold could claim the box for themselves is questionable, because according to § 398 et seq. of the Austrian Civil Code, half of the treasure belongs to the lucky finder and the other 50 per cent to the owner of the property. As cleverly as the gold had been hidden in the cellar, an investment in a gold-backed ETC such as Xetra-Gold might have been the better solution.
