- The Seychelles Business Registry has struck three companies off its register belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto impersonator Craig Wright
- Wright claimed for years that the companies were all connected to the 1.1 million bitcoins mined by Satoshi
- The businesses were all used to back up a fictional Tulip Trust, which was involved in multiple lawsuits
The Seychelles Business Registry has struck three companies off its register that Satoshi Nakamoto impersonator Craig Wright claims hold the Satoshi Bitcoin fortune. Wright used the companies to file several lawsuits, including a billion-dollar lawsuit against a plethora of Bitcoin developers after he claimed to have lost over $1 billion in a hack, but the revocation proves that Wright’s critics were right all along – the companies were nothing but empty shells. Wright is currently living in Asia, where he fled having lost against the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) so as to avoid prison on a contempt of court charge.
Don’t Trust the Tulip Trust
The three companies in question, Tulip Trading Limited, Wright International Investments Ltd, and Equator Consultants AG, all form part of what Wright calls the Tulip Trust. This was invented in October 2014 when Wright tried to fool the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) into thinking that he owned the 1.1 million bitcoins thought to have been mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, with the whole thing backdated to 2011 to fit in with this narrative. Wright had been saying for years that he owned a ‘Seychelles Trust’ which was in overall control of the coins, but when backed into a corner by the ATO, Wright purchased Tulip Trading Ltd from a company in the Seychelles and concocted a story that this company was one of two formed in 2011 and whose assets went into the Tulip Trust. The other company was Wright International Investments, which Wright claimed had been running since 2009.
The ATO ultimately failed to believe Wright’s story, which was backed up by forged emails and sloppily written ‘contracts’, but it wasn’t until the Kleiman v Wright trial that the whole sordid mess came out; Wright’s opponents proved through forensic document analysis that all the evidence Wright had backing up his story was fabricated and dated between February and October 2014. The magistrate judge, Bruce Reinhart, eviscerated Wright’s claims over his bitcoin haul:
I completely reject Dr. Wright’s testimony about the alleged Tulip Trust, the alleged encrypted file, and his alleged inability to identify his bitcoin holdings. Dr. Wright’s story not only was not supported by other evidence in the record, it defies common sense and real-life experience.
Dr. Wright’s false testimony about the Tulip Trust was part of a sustained and concerted effort to impede discovery into his bitcoin holdings.
Ayre Takes the Bait
Wright’s parlous evidence was still enough to convince gambling tycoon and world’s worst predictor of events, Calvin Ayre, to accept 80,000 of the coins supposedly in the Tulip Trust as collateral for an $8 million loan to Wright to bail him out of his tax troubles in 2015, with the expectation that they would come back to him in 2020. In between this, the Trust was supposedly tapped during the disastrous ‘proof sessions’ of 2016, where Wright cheated wallet signatures and failed to move a coin from a Tulip Trust-associated block, but worse was to come; in February 2020, Wright claimed to have fallen victim to the world’s biggest non-cash heist, when over $1 billion worth of BTC, BCH and BSV were allegedly stolen from him, representing the stash he was supposed to be returning to Ayre in a few months’ time.
Wright used this ‘theft’ (which has never been publicly reported by the police) as the basis of a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against a collection of Bitcoin developers in 2021, claiming they owed him the coins back as they had a fiduciary duty over them. This case, however, was canned following Wright’s loss to COPA, with the judge in that case, Justice Mellor, finding it “totally without merit.”
Wright has always maintained his story over his Seychelles companies and the Tulip Trust, even using them to file two more aborted lawsuits in America, but the striking off of the companies shows that they were, after all, no more legitimate than his catastrophic Satoshi claim.
