Two metal detectorists found guilty in November 2019 of not reporting a £3m Viking hoard have now been ordered to pay more than £600,000 each or spend five more years in jail (BBC 'Herefordshire Viking hoard thieves must repay £600k' 21 December 2022). So they can buy their freedom for 120000 quid? As a reminder of this old case:
George Powell and Layton Davies were jailed in 2019 for not declaring their find of coins and jewellery in a field in Herefordshire four years earlier. [...] The hoard, found in a field in Eye, near Leominster, included a 9th Century gold ring, a crystal rock pendant, a dragon's head bracelet and an ingot which have since been recovered. [...] The men, who sold items they found to dealers, were convicted of theft and concealing their find, with Powell, 38, of Newport, jailed for 10 years and Davies, of Pontypridd, 51, for eight-and-a-half. Coin seller Simon Wicks, 56, was also convicted on the concealment charge and jailed for five years. Most of the estimated 300 coins believed to be in the hoard are still missing Photographs on Davies' mobile phone - later deleted, but recovered by police investigators - showed the larger hoard, still intact, in a freshly-dug hole. [...] When the men were sentenced, the judge [...] rejected their accounts that the items were with other people and an auction house in Austria and said the men deliberately stole items.
The article provides more details:
Judge Nicholas Cartwright told the men he believed about 270 coins are still being deliberately hidden by them. [...] Thirty coins, which have also been recovered, had a previous estimated worth of between £10,000 and £50,000, but at a proceeds of crime hearing at Worcester Crown Court, the judge said they had been valued by the British Museum at £501,000. The remaining 270 coins were valued at the lowest of £10,000 each. Mr Cartwright reduced the estimate by 10% to account for any possible damage, giving a value for the missing coins of £2.4m.
The two men must pay the money within three months or spend more time in jail.
The pricing here is not very well explained to the general public (whose heritage has been robbed) by the BBC. So, the thirty coins they actually have in the hand were first valued as "between £10,000 and £50,000" [I presume it means each], and when they took a closer look, they came up with a total value of £501,000. Half a million divided by thirty is £16700 each.
So, assuming the missing coins were the same kind of thing as the ones retrieved and assuming that none of them (NB none of those set aside for later sale - just think about that a moment) were worth much more, Judge Cartwright took the figure of £10,000 each, deducted ten percent - because he felt like it, so £9000 each.
Judge Cartwright (or whoever advised him) then multiplies £9000 by 270 to get £2,430,000. The missing coins, according to the figures quoted by the BBC have a market value (at 2019 prices?) of two million three hundred and forty pounds. No mention is made in the text of surrendering any of the coins and documentation concerning the find. So all the two imprisoned beep-beep boys have to do is to pay the state £1,200,000 and then find a way to flog off at leisure the rest of the £2,310,000 - worth of the coins? In 2020/21, the average cost of a prison place in England and Wales was 48,162 British pounds a year, so getting these men out and back into the fields four and six years earlier than their sentence saves the state over £500,000.
And, since the hoard has already been declared a Treasure by an inquest, is this money going to go to the landowners whose property was taken by these Treasure hunters?
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