Craig Wright’s motion to have the Kleiman lawsuit dismissed for lack of jurisdiction was denied. The court did not find Wright’s testimony to be credible, and ruled that it did, in fact, have jurisdiction in the Wright v. Kleiman proceedings for the battle over $11 billion in Bitcoin.
Wright challenges the Southern District of Florida’s jurisdiction
In what has now become the first official win for the plaintiffs in the Kleiman v. Wright case, Craig Wright‘s motion to dismiss the lawsuit due to lack of jurisdiction was denied. The court gave its decision on Aug. 15, with U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom saying she did not find Wright’s testimony to be credible.
Earlier in April, Wright presented a factual attack, saying the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction over his legal battle with Dave Kleiman’s estate. In his motion, Wright claimed that Kleiman’s estate failed to specify the citizenship of the director of Florida-based W&K Info Defense Research. The plaintiffs claim that Wright transferred 1.1 million BTC, or around $11 billion, from W&K, a company he and Kleiman owned and used to mine Bitcoin with.
Specifically, Wright argued that Uyen Nguyen, a Vietnamese national, was the “director” of said company, making the entire case outside of the court’s jurisdiction. He also claimed not to have had any contact with Nguyen since 2016.
However, Judge Bloom presented several pieces of evidence that showed Wright not only misrepresented Nguyen’s relationship to W&K but lied about his involvement with the company.
“What a tangled web we weave”
To better illustrate Wright’s inability to provide any credible evidence to his defense, Judge Bloom provided five different statements in which Wright gave different answers about the ownership structure of W&K.
In April 2013, Wright signed a contract recognizing Dave Kleiman owned 100 percent of W&K. Between July and August 2013, he declared that he and Dave Kleiman each owned 50 percent of W&K. Both contracts were before the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
Five years later, in April 2018, Wright claimed in an affidavit that he has “never been a member of W&K.” In June 2019, he testified under oath that he had “no idea” who the owners of W&K were, and unequivocally stated that he was not an owner of W&K.
To top it all off, in his motion Wright argued that three additional parties “may be members of W&K.” Those parties include Lynn Wright, his ex-wife, Uyen Nguyen, and Coin-Exch, an Australian corporation. As he claims, both Nguyen and Coin-Exch are foreign entities and their membership in W&K effectively voids the court’s jurisdiction over the case.
However, as the evidence he presented included questionable emails and several public filings, the court found it to be insufficient to support his claims.
Court documents also revealed an interesting fact: several pieces of evidence Wright originally presented were found to be forged, which is why he withdrew them from the motion. Among others, Wright reportedly submitted an email purported to be sent by Dave Kleiman, which turned out to have been created a year after his death.
The judge clearly didn’t find Wright’s testimony to be credible, and even went on to put a quote of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion in the middle of the filing.
“Oh! What a tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive,” she wrote in her decision, saying it was not the first time Wright attempted to obfuscate the truth about his involvement in W&K.
