For more than a decade, a computer expert from Newport in south Wales has doggedly fought to recover £500m of bitcoin he says was accidentally thrown into a council tip.
James Howells’ bid to become extremely rich reached a judge on Tuesday with a team of lawyers arguing that it was still possible to launch a hunt for his missing hard drive containing the bitcoin.
They claimed that rather than searching for a “needle in a haystack”, the position of the bitcoin hoard had been narrowed down to a small area and there was a “finely tuned” plan to retrieve it.
Howells, 39, says that in the summer of 2013 he accidentally put the hard drive containing his bitcoin wallet in a black bag during an office sort-out and left it in the hall of his house. His then partner is said to have mistaken the bag for rubbish and took it with her on a trip to the dump, where it has been lost ever since.
Howells quickly realised the mistake and has been asking Newport city council for help in getting the hard drive back, and even said he would share the money with the authority, to no avail.
At Cardiff civil and family court, Howells was represented by a team of lawyers working pro bono for his battle with the council. The authority is seeking an order to strike out Howells’ case before it can reach any full trial at the high court.
James Goudie KC, representing the council, said Howells had no legal claim to the hard drive. He said: “Anything that goes into the landfill goes into the council’s ownership.”
Goudie said Howells’ offer to share some of the bitcoin with Newport council amounted to a bribe. He said: “He is trying to buy something the council is not in a position to sell.”
Dean Armstrong KC, representing Howells, said the search may be described as a “needle-in-a-haystack case” but it was actually a “precise excavation” of a “small area which we have been able to identify”. Armstrong, who specialises in crypto and blockchain assets, added: “This is a finely tuned plan by expert excavators.”
The court heard Howells was being backed by data recovery engineers and legal teams working pro bono on the basis that they get a share of the bitcoin profits if successful.
Howells previously said he had been able to pinpoint the location of his hard drive to within “cell 2 – area 2” of the Docksway site in Newport, after he hired the council’s former head of landfill to help his cause.
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He has said he could “spend the rest of my life working nine to five and thinking about [the fortune] every day”, so he may as well keep trying to recover it.
Before the hearing, a spokesperson for Newport council said: “The council has told Mr Howells 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.
“Responding to Mr Howells’ baseless claims are costing the council and Newport taxpayers time and money which could be better spent on delivering services.”
Judge Keyser KC, the circuit commercial judge for Wales, reserved judgment.
