Judge Slams Craig Wright for Fake Documents and Perjured Testimony

Judge Bruce Reinhart has bashed Craig Wright for providing fake documents and giving perjured testimony throughout the ongoing litigations between Wright and Ira Kleiman during a hearing on Tulip Trust.

Reinhart doubted Wright’s credibility, stating that there were cases when the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto lied to the court:

“Particularly given my prior finding that Dr. Wright has produced forged documents in this litigation, I decline to rely on this kind of document, which could easily have been generated by anyone with word processing software and a pen […] I give no weight to sworn statements of Dr. Wright that advance his interests but that have not been challenged by cross-examination and for which I cannot make a credibility determination. I have previously found that Dr. Wright gave perjured testimony in my presence.”

On March 9, 2019, Judge Reinhart ordered Wright to provide a list of his Bitcoin holdings — which Wright stated he could not do as it was kept in a blind trust he could not access. Wright promised that he would need time until January 2020 for the list to be delivered by a bonded courier.

Judge Bloom allowed Wright until February 3, 2020, to file a notice with the court “indicating whether or not this mysterious figure has appeared from the shadows and whether the Defendant now has access to the last key slice needed to unlock the encrypted file.”

On January 6, 2020, Wright provided documents evidencing a previously undisclosed trust — “Tulip Trust III”. Both Judge Bloom and the plaintiffs asked several depositions seeking to determine how Wright has managed to obtain the Tulip Trust III documents, to which he objected to various interrogatories based attorney-client privilege and spousal privilege.

Wright rejects discovery stressing on attorney-client and spousal privileges

Wright stated that his wife is a trustee of the Tulip Trust, and obtained the trust agreement as an encrypted file during December 2019 from the trust’s counsel.

This way, Wright claimed that the communications between his wife, Ramona Watts, and the trust’s counsel, Denis Mayaka, are secured by attorney-client privilege, adding that communications between him and his wife are secured by spousal privilege.

The judge said that “the record does not establish that an attorney-client relationship exists between Mr. Mayaka and Ms. Watts,” also rejecting Wright’s “Mayaka Declaration” as it had not been properly authenticated. Moreover, the judge established that the Trust document did not identify Mayaka as counsel, stating that “he is assigned a different role.”

In conclusion the judge said that “the record does not establish that Mr. Mayaka is counsel to the Trustee of the Tulip Trust,” adding that there is no independent client-attorney relationship between Wright and Mayaka.

Judge requests judicial assistance from U.K. court

On the same day, the judge requested judicial assistance from the Senior Master of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court in the United Kingdom in the litigation between Kleiman and Wright.

The case revolves around the effort of Ira Kleiman, the deceased brother of David Kleiman, to get his brother’s share of the Tulip Trust — a treasure trove of over 1 millon Bitcoins (BTC) which was purportedly established by Wright and Kleiman after their alleged creation of Bitcoin.