On 23 October 2023, Dr Wright’s side served the first report of Dr Simon Placks on forensic document analysis. On the same day the parties exchanged expert evidence on digital currency technology (Professor Meiklejohn for COPA and Mr ZeMing Gao for Dr Wright).

COPA served their reply expert report (Madden2) on forensic document analysis on 17 November 2023. As Master Clark had directed, meetings between the respective experts took place and very helpful Joint Statements were produced, indicating what they agreed upon and where they disagreed.

COPA served its expert evidence on ASD on 21 November 2023 and on 30 November 2023 the ASD experts produced a helpful agreed Joint Statement.

On 8 December 2023, the Joint Statement from Mr Madden and Dr Placks was served. It addressed 47 of Dr Wright’s Reliance Documents. The experts concluded that 32 had had their metadata manipulated to record non-contemporaneous date/time values or are unreliable on other bases. At that stage, there was disagreement between the experts as to the remaining 15 of the 47. All 28 of the Reliance Documents in COPA’s list of 50 forgeries were agreed to be manipulated or unreliable. 17 of the Reliance Documents referred to in Dr Wright’s witness statement were agreed to have been manipulated or to be unreliable. In addition, the experts agreed that one of the sets of MYOB data purporting to show entries in 2009-2011 disclosed by Dr Wright was created in 2020, with the other set of MYOB data (provided to Dr Placks by Dr Wright as a reaction to the problems with the earlier data) created in 2023 and then backdated. The significance of at least some of the MYOB data was that they purported to support Dr Wright’s purchase of the domain name at which the Bitcoin White Paper was first published.

Meanwhile, however, 1^st December 2023 had passed without service of any reply witness statement from Dr Wright. The reasons for this emerged at the PTR, heard on 15^th December 2023, and are explained in my PTR Judgment, handed down on 20^th December: see [2023] EWHC 3287 (Ch).