- Craig Wright will have to pay $100 million to a former company after a jury ruled he stole intellectual property from his dead best friend
- Wright survived accusations related to fraud and unjust enrichment
- Wright’s supporters claimed the result confirmed he was Satsohi Nakamoto, but this is not true
Craig Wright was yesterday ordered to pay $100 million to W&K Informational Defense for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property. The jury returned the verdict after over a week’s deliberation, ruling that Wright was guilty of ‘conversion’ to the extent of $100 million but clearing him of accusations of fraud and other charges relating to the case. Both camps claimed the result as a victory, although impartial observers were quick to note that the result in no way confirmed Wright’s status as Satoshi Nakamoto.
Jury Comes to Agreement After Allen Charge
The verdict on the Kleiman vs Wright case came through on Tuesday morning, nearly two weeks after jurors were first handed the case. A verdict looked unlikely after they came back last week to say that they couldn’t agree on any of the seven counts they had been asked to adjudicate on, but an Allen charge from the judge seems to have pushed them through the stumbling blocks.
Wright was ruled to have committed $100 million worth of conversion, which is “when one person interferes with the personal property of another, for example by taking it or withholding it without lawful justification.” This relates to intellectual property that Wright and Dave Kleiman supposedly created during their time at the helm of W&K, for which the only evidence is supplied by Wright, much of which has been shown to be fraudulent.
Result Does Not Prove Wright is Satoshi
Wright said he was “incredibly relieved” that the end result was only being found liable for theft of his dead best friend’s assets, with his supporters also claiming that the result confirmed he was Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto, something that Law 360 reporter Carolina Bolado, who was in court every day and became the chief source of information on the case, told FullyCrypto that this was simply not true:
The fallout from this case will continue for the foreseeable future, not just because the fate of the $100 million is itself subject to another lawsuit which we will cover later this week.
