Under French law, all underwater archaeological finds belong to the state, so instead of reporting the discovery the fishermen kept quiet and sold the items illegally. The three finders were eventually prosecuted and handed suspended sentences, but while some of the 1,400 coins and other items including a gold dish have been recovered, most of the pieces remain missing and the most valuable object, an exceptional gold statue of a youth, was likely melted down.

In terms of value, estimates put the intact haul at between several tens of millions to many hundreds of millions of euros. That's an incredible sum of more than $500 million ($402m) today.

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