An article Saturday in the AmLaw Daily about a case pending in federal court down in Tampa brings to the fore one of my favorite types of public companies: the treasure hunters.

Odyssey Marine Exploration is a public company that makes its money (or tries to) by going out on the open seas and trying to find shipwrecked treasure. Odyssey believed it had uncovered one of the most lucrative shipwreck discoveries in history in May 2007, when it announced it had recovered 17 tons of gold and silver artifacts worth nearly $500 million from a secret Atlantic Ocean site codenamed the Black Swan (see the July 2007 video below about the haul).

As discussed in the AmLaw Daily article, the government of Spain contested Odyssey's right to the treasure. Spain claimed Odyssey had actually discovered a 19th-century Spanish frigate called the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes that had been sunk by a British warship, sued Odyssey for violating Spanish heritage laws, and later seized the company's Gibraltar-based flagship.

Odyssey had filed a salvage claim to the Black Swan site in U.S. district court in Tampa, but on Wednesday, U.S. magistrate judge Mark Pizzo recommended that the case be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction and that property recovered from the Black Swan site be returned to Spain under the principle of sovereign immunity.

Odyssey's discovery of the treasure back in May 2007 also spawned an unusual and interesting insider trading case. On January 17, 2008, the SEC announced that it had filed a complaint against Ernesto Tapanes, one of Odyssey's oceanographic surveying consultants. The SEC alleged that Tapanes engaged in insider trading shortly before Odyssey made its May 18, 2007 announcement of its discovery of the Black Swan shipwreck. The complaint alleges that on March 30, 2007, Tapanes

discovered an anomaly on the ocean floor, while surveying off the coast of Gibraltar. Within days of the discovery, Odyssey Marine confirmed that the anomaly was an 18th century shipwreck, code-named the Black Swan, containing tons of silver and gold coins. Shortly thereafter, Tapanes and others signed a confidentiality agreement agreeing to keep the find confidential and not to trade in Odyssey Marine stock.

The SEC alleged that despite signing the confidentiality/no-trade agreement, Tapanes purchased Odyssey stock prior to the public announcement of the discovery, and then sold it all for a profit of more than $107,000. Tapanes settled the case, agreeing to pay disgorgement of $107,101.92, plus a civil penalty of $107,101.92.