The poor of the Dutch city of Haarlem are about to benefit from a sum of nearly five million dollars -- the profits of an invested amount left to the city by a nineteenth century clockmaker.

Dutch television reported that, when he died in 1805, Johannes Coloembie left the equivalent of more than eight-thousand dollars to go to the city's poor, a-hundred-and-forty years after the death of his last servant.

The money was invested by a group of local churches.

Profits could have been even higher if it hadn't been for bad investments like the one in Russian railways before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 which wiped out the value of the shares after the network was nationalised.