Craig Wright’s colleague tried to stop court case — He didn’t listen

Christen Ager-Hansen, a former colleague of Craig Wright, has told Cointelegraph he tried to stop a disastrous court case before it began. 

But while Ager-Hansen came to believe the court case was unwinnable and Wright was a fraud, others, including Wright’s billionaire backer, Calvin Ayre, refused to back down.

Now Wright, who falsely claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto during the COPA vs. Wright trial in the United Kingdom, is facing a potential court date in the UK for perjury. High Court Judge Edward James Mellor ruled Craig Wright had lied “extensively and repeatedly ” during a six-week trial, which started in February.

“All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto,” Mellor ruled.

Mellor referred the matter to the Crown Prosecution Service on July 16. None of this surprised Ager-Hansen, who says alarm bells rang well before the case even began.

When Ager-Hansen met Wright

Ager-Hansen first met Wright in June 2022 while attending Royal Ascot, the high-society horse-racing event patronaged and frequently attended by members of the UK’s Royal Family.

He said Wright’s fraudulent playbook was broadly similar during their first meeting.

“I was shown what I now know were fraudulent documents showing that he was Satoshi — which was not true, ” Ager-Hansen told Cointelegraph.

Calvin Ayre, Wright’s billionaire financier, and Stefan Matthews, the co-founder and executive chairman of nChain, the company that manages the Bitcoin fork, Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision ( BSV ), were also in attendance during that first meeting.

“They wanted me to help him run his legal cases,” Ager-Hansen said.

Ager-Hansen explains that nChain is something akin to a “cult” with a cult mentality, and after agreeing to join, he was swiftly sucked into its strange inner workings.

Ager-Hansen says “the sick thing” is being in “a cult like this[...] is very exciting, actually.”

A hundred million reasons to lie

While there were undoubtedly troubling aspects of nChain, Ayre held the company together.

Regarding Ayre, Ager-Hansen said, “He’s much richer than people believe [...] I was very well paid. I was paid to win the case,” said Ager-Hansen. “I was offered $100 million to win this case.”

Ager-Hansen was not the only one with such a lucrative deal on the table. Ager-Hansen claims that nChain executive chairman Stefan Matthews was incentivized by Ayre in the same manner.

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During the trial, Matthews claimed Wright showed him a draft copy of the Bitcoin ( BTC ) white paper as early as 2008, but as Ager-Hansen explains, Matthews had a hundred million reasons to lie about that.

Like Wright, Mellor found Matthews “utterly unconvincing,” saying, “Mr. Matthews was considerably more careful in his lies than Dr. Wright, only lying where he had to do so to sustain Dr. Wright’s position.”

That might not help Matthews in the long run. If perjury charges are brought as expected, he may find himself in the dock alongside Wright.

The disastrous “mock trial”

Over time, Ager-Hansen’s worries about the case began to mount.

“I had this feeling that [Wright] was not trustworthy,” Ager-Hansen said.

Ager-Hansen says he arranged a mock trial for Wright in September 2023, during which Wright was questioned by a senior lawyer known in the UK as a King’s Counsel or KC.

“It was actually to show Calvin and Steven Matthews that Craig is a fraud,” Ager-Hansen said.

When we asked Ager-Hansen how Wright performed during the mock trial, his assessment was brutal.

“He was an idiot, just like it was in the real court case,” said Ager-Hansen. “I told Calvin and Steven — you are mad if you’re backing Craig. You have to focus on the business and distance yourself from him.”

That time #RichardHeartWasRight exposed #CraigWright of being the #FakeSatoshi in front of a live audience... pic.twitter.com/D6Djv6BX9j

— FreedomFutureGary (@ HexyFuture) March 14, 2024

Following the mock trial, the KC conducting Wright’s cross-examination was offered $100 million of his own. Like Ager-Hansen, the KC declined Ayre’s offer.

History shows that Matthews and Ayre unwisely chose to ignore the mock trial and Ager-Hansen’s concerns. He believes that both men were too heavily invested in the lie by this point.

Had Wright won, billions of dollars in legal cases would have been within Ayre’s grasp, and a heist on Bitcoin itself would have become possible. Pursuing the case at all costs was a triumph of greed over good sense.

Before the month was out, Ager-Hansen extricated himself from nChain and publicly raised a number of concerns about his former company.

Very bad news for Wright

Cointelegraph spoke with Andrew Balthazor, a digital assets and blockchain litigator at Holland Knight law firm, to discover how Mellor’s ruling might affect Wright in the future.

Besides a potential perjury charge that could result in prison time, Wright has made numerous enemies in multiple countries.

“He’s filed lawsuits in the UK, Florida and elsewhere [...] When people say he’s lying, he’s filed defamation cases against them. Those obviously haven’t aged well, given the current context,” Balthazor said. “Truth is generally a defense to claims of defamation.”

According to Balthazor, those Wright had previously targeted with legal action would potentially have a “valid claim” they could pursue — and Wright was never shy about litigating — earning him a legion of enemies.

Wright’s many, many legal cases

In December 2022, Wright lost a defamation case against Magnus Granath, better known by his online alias Hodlonaut. Granath had called Wright a “fraud.”

In December 2023, Wright won a defamation case against podcaster Peter McCormack. McCormack had called Wright a “fucking liar” and also said, “he’s a fraud, and he’s a moron.”

The UK judge found these statements met UK standards of defamation and ordered McCormack to pay for the damage to Wright’s reputation, which at that time was valued at one pound ($1.29).

Simultaneously to the McCormack case, Wright also pursued cases against Kraken and Binance, arguing that nChain-owned BSV should be listed as the real Bitcoin.

Balthazor also told Cointelegraph that Wright still has two open cases in Florida against Romona Ang, the wife of his deceased former colleague, Andy Kleiman.

A previous December 2021 trial in Florida ordered Wright to pay $100 million to WK Info Defense Research, a company widely accepted to have been founded by computer scientist Andy Kleiman and now owned by his widow.

Wright argues that he actually started the company, believing he should pay himself the $100 million (which has since increased to $143 million with interest).

A further case against Bitcoin core developers for control of 110,000 BTC ($7.4 billion) was reportedly dropped in April.

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All of these cases are now tainted by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) case and a further potential criminal case in the UK.

“The language used by the court was pretty strident. I think his personal credibility is obviously shot,” said Balthazor. “I think a good attorney is going to be able to use the evidence of his falsehoods in the COPA trial to undermine his credibility and possibly reopen issues that were thought closed.”

Christen Ager-Henson confirmed to Cointelegraph that he also plans to sue Wright, Matthews and Ayre. But first, the man who is not Satoshi is likely to face perjury charges in the UK.

It is a remarkable turn for Wright, who once brushed shoulders with British royalty but may soon find himself at His Majesty’s custodial pleasure.