[imagesource:deviantart]

A storm is brewing over the ownership of a sunken booty worth $20 billion (R375 billion) which was first found in 1981 off the coast of Columbia.

A US company called Glocca Morra claimed it discovered the lost treasure and after negotiating a ‘finders fee’ with the Colombian government, agreed to show them where X marked the spot –  in return for half of the estimated $20 billion fortune.

But three decades later, in 2015, Columbia’s then-President Juan Manuel Santos suddenly announced that his government had found the wreck at a different location. Glocca Morra, trading as Sea Search Armada, called out the Colombians on this supposed ‘separate find’ and claimed that it was part of the debris field from their 1981 find.

Fast forward another few years until the current president, Gustavo Petro, recently ordered his administration to exhume the “holy grail of shipwrecks” — the Spanish galleon San José — from the floor of the Caribbean Sea as soon as possible.

As these sorts of disputes are no longer settled with cannons and rapiers on the open seas, Sea Search Armada is now suing the Colombian government for half of any treasure there is to plunder, or $10 billion (R183 billion).

The San José galleon — with 600 crew members onboard — sunk some 2,000 feet on June 8, 1708, during a battle against the British in the War of the Spanish Succession. It remained a thing of legend for ages as its exact location was unknown.

Culture Minister Juan David Correa told Bloomberg that President Petro wants to bring the 62-gun, three-masted ship to the surface before his term ends in 2026 and is punting a public-private collaboration to see it happen.

“This is one of the priorities for the Petro administration,” he said. “The president has told us to pick up the pace.”

Sure it is. Correa went further to claim that their government researchers visited the coordinates shared by Glocca Morra back in the day and “concluded that there is no shipwreck there.”

Somewhere underwater there is a massive trove of gold, silver and emeralds estimated to be worth anywhere between $4 billion (R75 billion) and $20 billion (R375 billion).

Shiver me timbers.

[source:bloomberg]