Silver salvage fee sinks in court

It is one of life’s great mysteries: why do rational people persist in the delusion that the government isn’t the biggest street gang you’ve ever heard of?

The strange case of the good ship Tilawa is a reminder that when it comes to money, gambling and tax, the house always wins.

The SS Tilawa was a British freighter that now rests 2.5km down at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, after being hit by two torpedoes fired from a Japanese submarine in November 1942.

The cargo included 2,364 pieces of silver bullion that went down with the ship, along with nearly 300 of the 954 people on board.

The silver, property of the South African government, lay silently in the deep until it was salvaged by a UK company in 2017 and shipped off to a warehouse in Southampton.

There it sat while the salvors, Argentum Exploration, pondered what sort of payout they’d get from the South Africans for fetching the ingots off the seabed and delivering them to their original destination, the South African Mint.

Nothing, as it now turns out, which comes as a big surprise and probably not only to Argentum.

As eye-wateringly dear as the salvage must have been, the company’s plans to winkle a salvage fee out of Pretoria have been deep-sixed by Britain’s highest court.

The judges found that the bullion — which was going to be turned into coins — was “noncommercial cargo” and that our government was thus immune to a salvage fee.

To anyone who dreams of finding bottom-line-altering pirate treasure on a wild KwaZulu-Natal beach, the court’s decision may seem like the thinnest of split hairs, but there you go.

Render unto Caesar the coins that are Caesar’s — even if the nearly R1bn the cargo is worth will drop unnoticed into the deep, roiling troughs of the state capture sea.