I’m suing council for £500M because they won’t return my bin

A man from Wales is suing his Newport council in a last-ditch attempt to reclaim hundreds of millions of pounds of Bitcoin.

James Howells, 39, was an early investor in the cryptocurrency having read about its emergence on online forums in 2009.

By 2013, he owned 8,000 Bitcoins but mistakenly threw away the hard drive containing the private key needed to access the coins.

A peak valuation of the coins this year assessed them to be worth £495,314,800, the figure that Mr Howells is suing the council for.

Mr Howells, who says that his claim have been “largely ignored” said: “I’m still allocating 10% of the value for the council even though they have been problematic throughout.

“That would be £41m based on today’s rate but in the future, it could be hundreds of millions.

“If they had spoken to me in 2013 this place would look like Las Vegas now. Newport would look like Dubai. That’s the kind of opportunity they’ve missed.”

Such is the devotion of Mr Howells to retrieving the hard drive, he has quit his job as an IT engineer and partnered with investors who would take a large chunk of the value if found.

Mr Howells has even gone as far as recruiting the council’s former head of landfill to his team in an attempt to locate the exact site that the hard drive is likely to be in.

His legal team, put together by the same team of top barristers representing some of the alleged abuse victims of Harrods tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed, believe that there is an 80% chance of successfully accessing the Bitcoin if the hard drive is found.

The legal team have accused the council of refusing to engage with “world-renowned” experts whilst Mr Howells has gone one step further.

In an interview with Wales Online, he said: “This could be worth billions – this is the sort of money that starts wars and Newport council won’t even have a conversation about it. This is how inadequate they are.”

Any dig of the recycling plant would take 18 to 36 months followed by around a year of remediation work and would use artificial intelligence (AI) to complement the search.

Newport council has hit back at the claims of being unhelpful and has pointed to the potential environmental impact that any dig would have. Mr Howells team have said that they would conduct the work without having an adverse effect on the environment.

In a statement to Wales Online, 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. The council is the only body authorised to carry out operations on the site.

“The council follows a strict monitoring and reporting regime for all environmental parameters, which we report on frequently to the regulator. In common with other waste disposal authorities, exceedances of some of the levels do occur from time to time and these are logged in Natural Resources Wales’ compliance reports.

“Our monitoring and reporting regime is not related to Mr Howells’ claim and we believe the mention of it is nothing more than an attempt to draw attention away from a fundamentally weak claim which we are vigorously resisting. Yet again responding to Mr Howells’ baseless claims are costing the council and Newport taxpayers time and money which could be better spent on delivering services.”