While Mt. Gox owner Mark Karpeles was growing what would become the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, he should have been serving time in his home country of France. He was sentenced to a year in custody in 2010 on fraud accusations.

A newly obtained French court document shows that Karpeles has a civil and non-civil judgment pending where, in addition to custody, he also owes €45,000 ($60,000). The document is being published jointly for the first time by Ars Technica and the French publication Le Monde . (Read the French original here and an English translation here .)

The case was brought by a former employer who accused Karpeles of stealing customer user names, customer passwords, and a domain name, among other grievances. Under French law, Karpeles is not considered a criminal but rather “un délinquant,” a delinquent offender. It's a lesser label than “criminal,” because that word is reserved only for very serious crimes within the country.

The 2010 decision shows that Karpeles lost by default, and he was found liable of “fraudulent access to an automated data processing system” and “fraudulent changes to data contained in an automated data processing system.” The document also states that Karpeles admitted to French authorities that he had “pirated” a server.

At the time, Karpeles was living in Japan. But a year after the judgment, he'd taken over Mt. Gox, well before the exchange and digital currency had become a household name. The French court documents acknowledge that he was never notified of the case and did not defend himself—hence, he lost by default. Karpeles' own blog states he moved to Japan in 2009, and it appears he hasn't returned to France since.

“To be honest, I was not even aware of this,” he told Ars in May regarding the sentence. “I’ll investigate and see what has to be done.” Karpeles has not responded to numerous attempts for further comment since then.

The now-disgraced owner of Mt. Gox, formerly the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, is in the midst of an international bankruptcy case following the site's collapse in February. Mt. Gox shut down earlier this year in the wake of the “transaction malleability” problem that plagued other websites—losing more than 744,000 bitcoins (at present, over $463 million). The new French document adds fuel to claims by many Bitcoiners who simply do not believe that the site could lose so much money over time without someone at the top noticing.

What's more, Karpeles also had a run in with the law in his new home country of Japan. Reuters reported in April that “in Japan, Karpeles was sued by a customer in 2012 who claimed he had paid 15,000 euros ($20,700) for a website to be developed that was never built. Tokyo District Court ruled last May that Karpeles had to return the money.”

Didn't show up

Karpeles' most striking legal run in appears to be in France. The case involves Stephane Portha, who employed Karpeles from October 2003 until June 2005. Portha is the CEO of Eurocenter, a small French gaming studio. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

Court records say Portha filed a local civil case against Karpeles on October 19, 2005, alleging that Karpeles transferred a “large quantity of stored data” on company servers to other servers in France and the United States, which included:

client reference information such as e-mails, user names, and passwords; the users of the dialogue service, the IRC (Internet Relay Chat), the source files of the site itself, the software UNREAL IRC and its configuration dialog; the data also concerned hundreds of clients hosted under the domain name “ff.st”

The same 2010 document notes that Karpeles acknowledged that he had attempted to buy back the ff.st domain from Portha for €2,000 ($2,687), and that Karpeles threatened Portha if he refused, which it appears that he did.

According to Guillaume Sauvage, a French technology lawyer with BAGS Avocats in Paris, such a five-year delay between the initial filing of the civil complaint and Karpeles’ judgment is normal. While it is treated as one case, it is typical under French law for it to have criminal (jail time) and civil (monetary damages) components.

“There is a statute of limitations on this sentence of five years,” Sauvage explained in a French-language interview. “If he returns to France within those five years, he could appeal the judgment. If he comes back after five years, it’s unlikely that he will serve any jail time or pay the damages, but it will still be on his criminal record.”

That statute of limitations would expire in May 2015.

Sauvage also noted that because Karpeles did not appear in court or respond to the case, the judge’s one-year prison sentence was especially harsh. Karpeles likely would have received a lesser sentence had he made an appearance.

Customer service gone awry

In a now-deleted French-language blog post (Google Translate) dated November 23, 2006, Karpeles wrote that in April 2005, his boss at the time (presumably Portha) offered to buy the ff.st domain name from him as a way to help out Karpeles financially. Karpeles noted that ff.st was already hosting “a fair number of sites.” He said that Portha paid €2,000 ($2,679) for the site, and Karpeles was paid a “lump sum” of around €3,000 ($4,031), including a monthly salary.

But Karpeles seems to have been unhappy with how Portha was managing the hosting service, and Karpeles resigned from Eurocenter in June 2005. Suddenly, Portha disconnected all sites hosted on ff.st. Karpeles appeared to be frustrated that the hosting service that he created was being mismanaged, and so he created a new site called Nezumi.fr. It was designed to essentially be a refuge for those affected by the ff.st shutdown.

As he wrote:

Just to make sure [these customers were taken care of,] I created a service called ‘Nezumi,’ responsible for service monitoring for these customers; However, I only activated the hosting on new machines for customers that from the moment I was explicitly asked to do so. A few weeks later, the domain name "nezumi.fr" was suspended, and two servers were seized. Eurocenter officially accused me of stealing data from hosted sites (the data, let’s recall, are the property of the hosted, not the host) and the data of IRC services (which they were not covered by the contract since they are not legally transferable without the consent of all registrants). Although some might accuse me of stealing clients that I sold to Eurocenter, I would say that if the servers were not suddenly taken offline, so customers did not come and hold me accountable, I would not object to Eurocenter remaining as host.

Karpeles later wrote that his Nezumi servers were seized and he was detained for 48 hours. By December 2005, he moved from France to Israel, but he moved back to France the following year. In 2009, Karpeles left the country for good and headed for Japan, where he still lives.

“Why doesn’t he come to me when he has problems like this?”

After months of silence, Karpeles has only recently returned to Twitter, where he has opined on topics as profound as cats, Japanese public transit, and instant yakisoba. It's all much to the chagrin of many Bitcoiners who lost vast sums of money. Overall, however, the embattled CEO has said very little publicly since Mt. Gox collapsed. He hasn't even spoken much to his own mother.

“I have very little news from him,” Anne Karpeles, his mother, told Ars in a French-language telephone interview from her home in Switzerland. “I know that his work sent him to Japan for a new job [in 2009] and I have little news.”

She said she last saw him in Tokyo in November, when she finally went to go visit him. Ms. Karpeles said that her son seemed “comfortable in his own skin.”

When informed for the first time of this 2010 judgment against him in France, she sounded frustrated and surprised.

“Why doesn’t he come to me when he has problems like this?” she said. “I’m hardly up to date in the affairs of my son. Now he has a family and his work. I’m not well—I’m deathly worried. I can’t do much. But as I was saying to one of my friends, Mark is pretty honest. But he too easily trusts in dishonest people.”

Meanwhile, Mark Karpeles’ Tokyo-based hosting company, Tibanne (Mt. Gox’s parent company) remains open for business.

Anne Karpeles noted that she was hardly familiar with the world of Bitcoin and Mt. Gox, only learning about it recently. But she doesn’t believe that her introverted, hard-working son is at the center of a company that lost stakeholders nearly half a billion dollars.

“He has trouble expressing himself," she said. "He could very easily be giving the impression of guilt.”