A court filing has surfaced in the ongoing Kleiman v. Wright lawsuit that gives details concerning the existence of the alleged Tulip Trust and another trust known as the Tulip Trust II. The filing of Craig Wright’s declaration dated May 8, 2019 is partially redacted but gives a description of the ostensible trusts of bitcoin holdings. Further, the court mediation between both parties held on June 11 shows the case did not settle and resulted in an impasse. Kleiman’s lawyer has also revealed that Wright has not complied with the court’s order to list his bitcoin addresses prior to December 2013.
Also Read: These Are 2019’s Biggest Cryptocurrency Winners and Losers so Far
Kleiman vs. Wright Case Not Settled and Remains at an Impasse
On Valentine’s Day 2018, the brother of the now deceased David Kleiman filed a lawsuit against Craig Wright for the rightful ownership of hundreds of thousands of bitcoins and the valuable intellectual property rights of various blockchain technologies. Unproven reports have led people to believe that David Kleiman was possibly a member of a presumed Satoshi Nakamoto team. The plaintiff, Ira Kleiman, and his attorneys have said that it is unclear whether Craig, Dave or both created Bitcoin, but they believe “it is undeniable, however, that Craig and Dave were involved in Bitcoin from its inception and that they both accumulated a vast wealth of bitcoins from 2009 through 2013.” The Australian native Craig Wright has claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto for years now, but has yet to prove his assertions to the greater cryptocurrency community.
Ira Kleiman represents his brother David’s estate and the family claims that Wright exploited David’s inheritance and fraudulently took his bitcoin assets which far exceed $5.1 billion worth of BTC. Recently Wright’s defense lawyers explained how Wright and Kleiman participated in a blind trust and the defense detailed how it had a very complex encryption system coupled with Shamir’s Secret Sharing Algorithm. However, the plaintiffs did not seem to buy the story and forced Wright to explain more in a motion to compel order signed by the Judge. During the beginning of the week when Wright was summoned to court in person, court documents had shown some paperwork was sealed and the two parties could not settle the case during mediation on June 11.
Wright’s Testimony From May Emerges
On June 20 a new filing surfaced which is dated May 8, 2019, and it describes the blind trust set up and some of the members involved. Wright stated that on that day in May he met with his counsel in the U.K. and provided them with information about the bitcoin he mined before December 31, 2013 and the Tulip Trusts. Wright claims to have mined bitcoin between 2009 and 2010 and mined the funds directly into a trust held in Panama. He later transferred the encrypted files that control access to the coins in June 2011 and this was the original Tulip Trust.
According to Wright, the trust was formed in Seychelles. “While the trustee was initially David Kleiman, additional trustees were appointed upon the execution of the formal trust document,” Wright noted in the filing. The names of the trustees in the court document are redacted except for Wright, Uyen Nguyen, and David Kleiman. Uyen Nguyen is named in many of the documents submitted to the court and Wright insists in the May 8 document that he hasn’t had contact with her since 2016. There are plenty of posts discussing Uyen Nguyen on social media from May 2016 but her online presence was scrubbed. There are two alleged photos of her located on the Wayback Machine (Archive.org) which can be found here and here.
After additional trustees were appointed, two firms were tied to the trust, the Australian company Panopticrypt Pty Ltd. and a Seychelles institution called CO1N Ltd. Both companies went into liquidation, and throughout the filing, Wright mentions a few points of contact for some of the trust’s participants. One person mentioned was a man named Denis Mayaka who Wright declared worked for Savanah Ltd. and Equator Consultants AG. Denis Mayaka’s profile online says he is the CEO of a company called The Offshore House. Mayaka was featured in a Finance Feeds interview back in 2015 and told the publication how Seychelles was becoming a hub for offshore banking. Wright also discloses another name in the court document, a woman he hasn’t been able to contact named Ritzela DeGracia. Allegedly DeGracia represented a firm named Highsecured according to Wright’s testimony, but there is little information on this entity online.
Shelf-Made Companies and Websites Tied to Encryption and Blockchain Tech
Wright revealed that up until 2013 he directed staff at “Highsecured and Signia Enterprises to acquire Bitcoin on the market and hold it on behalf of the Tulip Trust.” He also mentions that “principals of Highsecured were arrested in 2015,” but he doesn’t reveal why these arrests took place. Researching DeGracia’s surname online shows that this woman possibly owns a boatload of web domains that pertain to a variety of ‘shelf-made company‘ subjects. A portion of websites deal with diet pill supplements, but a great majority of these sites are related to encryption and systems security. For instance, DeGracia’s websites include titanencryption.com, encryptdesk.com, encryptcrm.com, datoencriptado.com, samuraisecured.com, serverfortify.com, encryptfire.com, totalencrypt.com, xenoencrypt.com, and many more similar domains.
Another person not mentioned in the testimony but associated with a lot of the business documents tied to Uyen Nguyen, Craig Wright and David Kleiman is Bryan Anthony Thornton. Research shows that Thornton was allegedly the director of over 1,000 registered limited companies, many of which have an officer called CFS Secretaries Ltd. He’s assumed to be a company broker who creates what’s known as ‘ready made shelf companies.’ Thornton’s companies are very interesting, and much like DeGracia’s websites lots of them pertain to cryptographic technologies. For example, Thornton’s associated companies include names like Btcpay Ltd., Payward Ventures, Careonchain, Coinedr, and BC Global Resources. The company BC Global is a London based blockchain venture founded in 2016 according to the website. The company says it is operated by two individuals with doctorates and reportedly the company no one’s ever heard about received $20 million in funding in September 2017 from a firm called Finance72.
Kleiman Attorney: ‘Craig Wright Hasn’t Complied With the Court’s Order’
The latest filing from May was opened on June 20 and many people have dissected the self-proclaimed Satoshi testimony so far. The website Satoshi Itches researched the subject and found some discrepancies within Wright’s testimony. “Craig has sworn in court that a trustee of Tulip Trust I is C01N Ltd, which did not exist until 2014,” explains the researchers. Wright’s testimony says the trust was executed in October 2012 and that the company was dissolved on July 4, 2017. The court has decided it will preside over a second deposition with Wright on June 28 in the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach. More information concerning this fascinating case involving billions of dollars worth of BTC will likely be revealed next Friday. Wright has been trying relentlessly to get the case dismissed but he’s been denied and has been forced to reveal more about his mysterious dealings with David Kleiman. Moreover, on June 21 Kleiman’s legal attorney noted on Twitter that Wright has not yet complied with the court orders. The Kleiman estate’s lawyer Vel Freedman stated:
Craig Wright hasn’t complied with the court’s order to list his bitcoin as of 12/31/13. He remains under an order to show cause why Judge Reinhart shouldn’t issue sanctions under R.37 & order him to appear before Judge Bloom to explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt.
What do you think about the recent court filing stemming from Wright’s testimony from last May? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
Image credits: Shutterstock, Pacer, Courtlistener, BC Global Resources, the Panopticrypt website on Archive.org, and Pixabay.
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