Craig Wright’s contempt of court case in the UK over alleged embargo breach has been abandoned

Britain’s contempt of court proceedings against Craig Wright, who claims to be Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, have been dropped after judges said they were ill-equipped to proceed in a case where the facts were disputed.

It was no longer in the public interest to proceed against Wright even though there was prima facie evidence that Wright disclosed details of a judgment before it was due to be published, English High Court judge Mark Warby said at a hearing on Wednesday. .

“We have concluded that it is no longer in the public interest to pursue these proceedings,” said Warby, who also spoke on behalf of Judge Matthew Nicklin, adding that the court was “ill-equipped to proceed in contempt cases where the underlying facts is disputed, or a number of legal issues have been raised.”

“We are satisfied that there is prima facie evidence of a breach by Dr. Wright of the embargo on the draft judgment,” Warby said.

Posting judgments in advance is common practice in English courts, allowing lawyers for both sides to correct errors and prepare a response, but disclosing content before official publication can be treated as contempt of court – a deemed prejudice to legal proceedings that can result in a sentence of up to two years in prison.

Messages posted on a Slack channel by Wright last August could be read as “intent to disclose” the contents of a judgment regarding journalist Peter McCormack that had been sent to Wright’s lawyers just hours earlier, Judge Martin Chamberlain said last year in a ruling . who referred the case for further investigation.

According to Chamberlain, Wright said the Slack messages were meant to “encourage debate” and that he “didn’t realize” that a separate email he forwarded to five unauthorized people contained a summary of the verdict.

In a later affidavit filed in March, Wright said key evidence regarding the alleged breach had been submitted by his lawyers to Ontier without his permission and constituted legally privileged material. Faced with a skeleton argument of 17,000 words made by Wright’s new lawyers, supported by 1,600 pages of legal authority, Warby concluded that the costs of proceeding outweighed the benefits.

Wright sued McCormack for libel in 2019, after McCormack said the Australian computer scientist was not the true author of the pseudonymously written 2008 white paper that first described the idea of ​​bitcoin as a cryptocurrency.

While McCormack abandoned his defense on costs, Wright was awarded just £1 in damages, as Chamberlain found that Wright had “put forward a deliberately false case until shortly before the trial”. McCormack was also ordered to pay around £900,000 ($1.1 million) in costs.

In a separate ruling last October, Judge Helen Engebrigtsen at the Oslo district court in Norway said that Markus Granath, who tweeted as Hodlonaut, had “good factual basis to claim that Wright had lied and cheated in his attempt to prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto . “

Ontier and the new attorney for Wright did not immediately respond to a request for comment.