Colombia is hoping to speed up its mission to recover a three-century-old sunken treasure worth as much as $20 billion as ownership of the wealth lies in legal limbo amid an ongoing court battle.
President Gustavo Petro ordered his administration to dig up the “holy grail of shipwrecks” — the Spanish galleon San José — from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea as soon as possible, the country’s culture minister told Bloomberg last week.
Petro wants to bring the 62-gun, three-masted ship to the surface before its service life ends in 2026 and has asked for a public-private partnership to be formed to see it through, Culture Minister Juan David Correa told the outlet Wednesday.
“This is one of the priorities for the Petro administration,” he said. “The president has told us to speed up.”
The galleon San Jose sank in a battle against British ships on June 8, 1708. Wikipedia
But mystery surrounds the ownership of a vast fortune of gold, silver and emeralds estimated to be worth between $4 billion and $20 billion, according to the lawsuit.
The main issue seems to revolve around who is believed to have found it.
The galleon San José — with a crew of 600 — sank about 2,000 feet on June 8, 1708, during a battle against the British in the War of the Spanish Succession. It remained a legend for many years as its exact location was unknown.
The wreck was discovered and photographed about 2,000 feet underwater in 2015.Presidencia de la República – Colombia The wreck has been known as the “holy grail of shipwrecks” because of its great treasure. Presidency of the Republic – Colombia
Then in 1981, the US company Glocca Morra claimed it had found the lost treasure and handed over its settlement to Columbia with the promise that it would receive half of the treasure upon recovery.
Years later, in 2015, then-Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said the country’s navy found the San José wreck in a different location on the seabed.
Columbia has never released the coordinates of the ship’s final resting place, but Glocca Morra – now called the Sea Search Armada – believes the country found part of the same debris field in 2015 that was first discovered 34 years earlier.
The company is suing the Colombian government for half the property, or $10 billion, it estimates, under the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement, according to Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, Correa told the outlet that government researchers visited the coordinates shared by the Sea Search Armada and “concluded that there is no shipwreck there.”
With Postal wire
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
