Millions in Silver Bullion Found on Sunken WW2 Merchant Ship

Recall this example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Edinburgh_(16)

I remember the salvage of gold bullion from HMS Edinburgh well; there was a pretty good TV documentary made about the salvage effort. I hadn’t realised that there was a second salvage operation that recovered 29 more gold bars; the original salvage operation recovering 431 out of the total of 465 that went down with the ship.

I suppose it is only the commercial possibilities of salvage that is ever going to get video cameras down to the thousands of merchant ships (or aircraft) that must lie on the deep ocean floors.

I’m sure they have “friends” in the Department for Transport, hence why they get to keep an astounding 80% of the British people’s silver bullion and march through our war graves!

Are they still allowed to disturb the wreck as it is a war grave? I believe 11 crew and 70 lascars died when the ship went down and a further two of the survivors died trying to get ashore on the Cornish coast.

The idea makes me uncomfortable.

Regards,

kev35

Since they will be happy to grant permission to recover the loot (notwithstanding the fact that the wreck is otherwise protected under the PMR Act) then they could spend the money recovered on emulating our American cousins and finding one or two of our missing service personnel. Probably not, though.

Great, the British people get an amazing 20% of the value back. Nice to see screwing the taxpayer is alive and well in the department of transport :rolleyes:

Wow – that’s nearly 900 metres deeper than the Titanic!
Was that shots of the silver ingots on the video?

Interesting!

They would need a Protection of Military Remains Act licence, though.

Recall this example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Edinburgh_(16)