Treasured items ended up on this scrapheap for a mere $2,550

The 83 mistakenly destroyed safe deposit boxes - which could now end up costing DBS Bank millions in compensation - were originally sold to a scrap metal company in a deal worth a mere $2,550.

The Xun Xiang Metalware Company, in Cha Kwo Ling, bought a total of 920 safe deposit boxes, weighing a total of 1.7 tonnes, on Saturday afternoon for $1,500 per tonne.

'Our company only buys scrap metal, and not safe deposit boxes. To us, safe deposit boxes are just another type of scrap metal. We've bought similar things before,' said Chan Kin-hung, who operates the scrap merchant.

Staff from the DBS Bank contacted the company on Sunday and arranged to buy back the boxes - whether they were intact or had already been scrapped - for the same price.

By then, a number of the boxes had already been fed into a cutter and sliced into metre-long pieces. The company had planned to ship the scrap metal overseas.

'Our workers tell me that part of it [the job] had been cut and part of it hadn't yet, but we immediately stopped all operations,' said Mr Chan.