According to Golden Finance, James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport, is suing the Newport Municipal Council in the UK for 495 million pounds (about 647 million U.S. dollars) in damages for accidentally discarding a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins. Howells tried many times to retrieve the hard drive from the local landfill, but was obstructed by the municipal council, which repeatedly rejected his request to dig the land. In 2013, he accidentally threw away the hard drive containing bitcoins during a household cleanup, and now these bitcoins are worth nearly 500 million pounds.