'I'm taking the council to court because they won't give me back my bin bag'

James Howells, 39, has been battling the council for a decade after his bitcoin wallet was accidentally thrown away during an office clear out and taken to a rubbish dump

A man has taken a local council to court in a “last resort” to get back almost half a billion pounds worth of Bitcoin that was accidentally dumped in a recycling centre in 2013.

James Howells, 39, has been battling officials for 10 years for permission to get it back after he put the hard drive containing the Bitcoin in a black bag during a spring clean. His partner at the time then took the rubbish to a dump in Newport, Wales, which he wanted excavated.

The computer engineer says the mix-up has caused him to lose access to cryptocurrency coins which have since skyrocketed in value. A court document shows Howells is reportedly suing Newport Council for £495,314,800 in damages - the peak valuation of his 8,000 Bitcoins from earlier this year, WalesOnline reports.

According to the father, it is not a reflection of "what is really going on" and he is instead trying to "leverage" the council into excavating the landfill so that they can avoid a legal battle. Mr Howells says he has already found a team of experts to carry out the £10million dig at no cost to the council and has even offered the council 10% of the coins' value if recovered.

Mr Howells, whose case is finally due to be heard in December, 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."

The lost Bitcoins were worth less than £1m when they were dumped, but just three months later, the value rose to £9m. Mr Howells says they could one day be worth billions. His claim, prepared by the same team of top lawyers representing some of the alleged abuse victims of Harrods tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed – says he first met with a council representative in November 2013 but has since been "largely ignored".

The dad has still not given up, quitting his IT job and dedicating his life to retrieving the wallet as "a full-time operation". He has even hired the council's former head of landfill to his team, helping him work out the lost hard drive is in 'Cell 2 – Area 2' of the Docksway landfill.

He said: "Who better than him? He has a very good memory of where things were being buried in summer 2013. The joke among us is that he's the one who buried my hard drive. I've got to have a laugh about it." Mr Howells' team believe there will be an 80% chance of the hard drive's data being retrievable if they were to find it.

But the council has rejected Mr Howells' pleas for a search due to environmental concerns. His team of experts insist they would "safely excavate" the Newport site in a search assisted by artificial intelligence (AI).

Lawyers for the council argue it now legally owns the hard drive because it was left at the tip. Mr Howells' barristers, Dean Armstrong KC, Maria Mulla, and Bruce Drummond, denied this, saying he never intended to dump his bitcoin, or the intellectual property on it.

Mr Howells said: "The legal effort is covered. We're willing to go all the way to the appeals court, the Supreme Court. With a case of this magnitude I'm expecting to go the full distance. I didn't really want to go to court but this is the final shot."

A spokesperson for Newport Council said in a statement: "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."