COPA’s ALLEGATIONS OF FORGERY
I have addressed the detail of COPA’s allegations of forgery in the Appendix. I have also addressed certain other documents (e.g. the Papa Neema emails and their enclosures) in the body of this Judgment.
As I have related above, at various stages of my management of this case, I had to limit the number of forgery allegations which COPA was permitted to pursue, to keep the case within manageable proportions and on track. This resulted in all or the vast majority of the documents disclosed or relied upon by Dr Wright falling into one of the following categories:
First, documents in respect of which COPA’s allegation of forgery was permitted to be pursued at trial – as just mentioned, I have addressed these documents in the Appendix, and certain other documents in the body of this Judgment.
Second, documents pleaded by COPA to be forgeries at an earlier stage, before I placed a further limit on the allegations which COPA could pursue, but which could not be pursued at trial.
Third, documents falling outside the first two categories which were examined in Madden1 and which he found to be inauthentic.
Fourth, documents whose authenticity was not challenged by COPA. Most, if not all of these documents are relied on by COPA as establishing the relevant sequence of events and are referred to, explicitly or implicitly, in this Judgment.
Thus, the documents I deal with in the Appendix are (i) the original forgeries alleged in the Particulars of Claim (ii) the ‘top 20’ from the first set of forgery allegations, plus (iii) a further 20 selected from the ‘Additional Documents’.
I should briefly mention some of the consequences of my case management which gave rise to the documents in the second category. The point is that the choices made by COPA when deciding on their original 50 additional allegations of forgery were disrupted. I mention two main effects of this:
First, it is apparent that allegations of forgery were made against a number of related documents which purported to be versions or drafts of the Bitcoin White Paper, including three documents labelled ‘Backdated Bitcoin White Paper’ (1), (2) & (3), {ID_000536}, {ID_000537} and {ID_000538}, and three coffee-stained copies or images {ID_003330}, {ID_004011} and {ID_004010}. Three of those documents had to be excised from the list of forgeries that COPA could pursue at trial, even though there was a degree of cross-reference between the reasons for the allegations of forgery. I have taken account of this in section 30 of the Appendix, as this is the only way to make sense of the allegations made against {ID_004011}. In doing so I was satisfied that Dr Wright had every opportunity to make his case in response.
Second, it is apparent that COPA was thereby prevented from pursuing a number of allegations of forgery which related to the establishment of the Tulip Trust and Dr Wright’s acquisition of Tulip Trading Limited, specifically in relation to {ID_001421}, {ID_001919}, {ID_001925} and {ID_001930}. I have little doubt that COPA were sanguine about those allegations, since they were likely to re-emerge in the claim brought by Tulip Trading Limited against the Developers. (As a postscript, whilst preparing this Judgment I have learned that that claim has recently been discontinued).
A third point to mention is that some of these documents were the subject of cross-examination of Dr Wright in any event.
I was addressed by the Developers on the status of a number of documents relating to the establishment and acquisition of Tulip Trading Limited, but I was not otherwise addressed on the documents in the second and third categories. As far as I am aware, no such document was relied upon by Dr Wright in his Closing Submissions. However, due to my confidence in the reliability of the analysis carried out by Mr Madden (most of which was agreed by Dr Placks or Mr Lynch in their respective Joint Statements) and in so far as is necessary I make a general finding that none of the documents in the second and third categories are authentic.