Haro on the nest egg. Two of the three workers who had shared, with the owner of the premises, 34 gold bars found during work in a house in Vouzon, in the Loir-et-Cher, were invited by the Court of Appeal of Orléans to return their share to the third, considered the inventor of the treasure. In July 2015, breaking a concrete slab in the cellar of a property, three workers had found a first plastic box in which they had discovered ten gold bars. They then got their hands on two more boxes.
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After agreeing on the sharing with the owner, 34 ingots in total had been sold for one million euros. The owner keeping half, each worker had received 139,000 euros. But the user of the jackhammer, considering himself cheated, had brought the case in September 2017 before the tribunal de grande instance of Blois which had canceled this transactional sharing. Justice had then decided that the discoverers of the treasure were only two: the one who held the jackhammer and the one who had removed the rubble with his shovel.
Dismissed, the one who had first opened the box when his colleagues urged him to be careful for fear of an explosive device, had appealed. The Orleans Court of Appeal ruled on Monday: the one holding the shovel is the inventor. "The inventor of the treasure is the one who first made it visible", pleaded Me Antoine Béguin. "It played out at 15 seconds," he explained. "My client scraped off the pieces of concrete, put his hand on a box. That makes him the inventor." His two colleagues will therefore have to return their share to him.
