Two men convicted of stealing over 3,600 ancient gold coins from a Dacian city abandoned in 2 AD and selling them at top auction houses around the world have been ordered to pay compensation to the Romanian state worth nearly GBP 3.7 million.

The Court of Appeal in the west-central Romanian city of Alba Iulia handed down the USD 5.2 million fine to the two tomb raiders following a lawsuit filed by Romania’s Ministry of Culture in 2017.

Former gold miner Darius Liviu Baci met jobless Mircea Mihaila when the two emigrated to Austria in the 90s and the pair lived in a refugee camp set up for people from Eastern Europe.

The two men did not manage to settle in Austria, but they did meet three men who specialised in plundering archaeological sites and also the Serbian Dusan Djuric, an intermediary in transactions with coins and artefacts obtained illegally by professional tomb raiders.

In the mid-90s, the pair returned to Romania where they then started earning large amounts of money with no visible source of income by becoming tomb raiders, and were later convicted of plundering the country’s archaeological sites stealing valuables including gold jewellery.

They hit the jackpot when, together with two other men, they located over 3,600 gold coins with a combined weight of 30 kilogrammes (66 lbs) from the ruins of Sarmizegetusa Regia, the ancient Dacian capital, in west-central Romania in 1998.

The Romanian officials eventually got onto the trail after the coins started being sold at prestigious auction houses across the world including Europe and the US, and the deciding evidence was provided by a forest ranger who found them at the time with camouflage gear digging in the area.

The ranger said the men had rucksacks filled with gold coins, but as he was alone he was too scared of confronting the gang that included the two tomb raiders as well as two local guides, and only later revealed to investigators what he had seen, and showed officials the site where the gang had been digging.

Local media report that Baci, despite being unemployed, managed to bank a substantial sum of money and also bought a business in 1999. He also purchased a high-end car, shares in companies and went on several swanky holidays.

The pair were jailed for four years in 2016 and now the Romanian state has won a civil case against them that was filed the next year for compensation, although all experts agree that the value demanded was far below the real value of the items stolen, and without taking into account the damage caused by removing the coins before they could be properly investigated.

The figure for value was calculated by valuing each stolen piece at USD 1,460 and multiplying it by the number of stolen coins still missing – 3,572 – resulting in a fine of USD 5,215,120.

Interpol has since recovered a number of the stolen pieces and is still searching for the remainder.

The two men, who are still in prison, were also ordered to pay the Ministry of Culture EUR 22,905 (GBP 19,664) to cover the amount it spent in recovering 28 of the stolen pieces.

Most of the missing pieces display the head of a king with abundant locks on the obverse and a goddess sitting atop a throne on the reverse.