Cleaner who found gold bars in rubbish bin to get nothing

Seven bars wrapped in newspaper worth total
of £240,000 found in South Korea

One-Minute Read

The BBC says the bars were found on 29 April,
wrapped in newspaper and discarded in Incheon Airport by a male
cleaner. Collectively they are said to be worth 350 million won
(£240,000). Each bar weighs 2.2lbs.

Korean law usually works on a finders-keepers basis – but there
is an exception for employees working on company property. The
airport says the cleaner will therefore receive no reward as he was
doing his job when he found the gold.

There is no proof the gold was connected to any crime, says the
BBC, but the Korea Times reports that police “identified the
Korean owner of the gold bars … and concluded he had discarded
them for fear of being caught”.

If the owner had come forward to claim the gold and the cleaner
had not been working when he found it, he would still have been
entitled to between 5% and 20% of the gold’s value – around
£48,000.