A man has initiated a lawsuit against his local council seeking $648 million and vows to continue until the court definitively states ‘N-O spells no’.
Most of us have experienced that sinking feeling when realizing we’ve accidentally discarded something valuable, like a misplaced ten-pound note in old clothing. But one man’s predicament is on an entirely different level.
James Howells from Newport, Wales, faced an unfortunate situation in 2013 when a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin—now valued at an astronomical sum—was mistakenly thrown away by his partner.
Howells had been reorganizing his home office, placing various items in a black bag in the hallway. His partner, mistaking it for trash, took the bag to the dump, not knowing it held the hard drive with all of Howells’ Bitcoin.
The 39-year-old computer expert promptly contacted Newport City Council to seek permission to search for the hard drive, but the council refused his request.
Since then, Howells has been engaged in a decade-long struggle, reportedly even enlisting the expertise of NASA data recovery engineers, top legal professionals, and the former head of the council’s waste services, who ironically helped “bury” the drive when employed by the council years ago.
He has also filed a legal claim amounting to $648 million (£495,314,800) in an effort to retrieve the hard drive, which is now estimated to be worth $514.37 million.
Howells estimates it would cost $13 million to excavate the segment of the landfill—identified as Cell 2 – Area 2—where he believes the hard drive is located. He has accused the council of not being ‘a fit and competent landfill operator’, claiming the site has violated environmental regulations for four years. He has proposed to ‘modernize’ the landfill if allowed to search for his hard drive.
Reflecting on his situation, Howells stated: “I could spend the rest of my life working nine-to-five and thinking about it every day. I might as well spend my time trying to recover this simple piece of metal.”
Despite investing all his current resources, Howells remains determined to pursue the matter until the court definitively states ‘N-O spells no’.
“The legal effort is covered. We’re willing to go all the way to the appeals court, the Supreme Court,” he said. “With a case of this magnitude, I’m expecting to go the full distance. I didn’t really want to go to court but this is the final shot.”
Newport Council has since issued a response to Howells’ claims.
A council spokesperson reiterated that Howells has been informed ‘multiple times’ that excavation is ‘not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area’.
The spokesperson added that the council is the ‘only body authorized to carry out operations on the site’ and adheres to a ‘strict monitoring and reporting regime for all environmental parameters’, which is ‘frequently’ reported to the regulator.
“In common with other waste disposal authorities, exceedances of some of the levels do occur from time to time and these are logged in Natural Resources Wales’ compliance reports,” they continued. “Our monitoring and reporting regime is not related to Mr. Howells’ claim and we believe the mention of it is nothing more than an attempt to draw attention away from a fundamentally weak claim which we are vigorously resisting.”
The spokesperson concluded: “Yet again responding to Mr. Howells’ baseless claims are costing the council and Newport taxpayers time and money, which could be better spent on delivering services.”