WEST PALM BEACH – A magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida granted in part and denied in part a motion to reconsider discovery requests in a case filed by a man who claims his late brother is a co-founder of Bitcoin and that the remaining co-founder tried to cheat their family out of money.
Ira Kleiman sued Craig Wright, on behalf of his late brother Dave Kleiman in February 2018 over allegations that Wright created a scheme to snatch Dave Kleiman’s estate from his Bitcoins and his rights to intellectual property connected to the billion-dollar company.
In the latest movement of the case, Ira Kleiman, who filed the suit with W&K Info Research LLC, a company that Dave Kleiman and Wright used to own together, asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart to reconsider previous discovery rulings. The plaintiffs argue that Reinhart made the rulings under a premise that facts would be proven for trial.
U.S. District Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart
| http://sdfla.blogspot.com
“...I have repeatedly told all the parties, all discovery rulings are without prejudice to de novo reconsideration if a party in good faith believes the Rule 26(b)(1) analysis has changed,” Reinhart wrote in a March 2 order.
He then agreed to reconsider the eight rulings in question.
Reinhart declined to order the first request that would require Wright’s legal team to provide non-privileged details of how they looked into a trust document.
“Plaintiffs have not cited any authority for the proposition that the information obtained during this inquiry is non-privileged and otherwise discoverable,” Reinhart wrote.
He also declined to order Wright to present a sworn statement of the background of the trust documents as he determined that it’s inconsistent with what the case needs. He also pointed out that Wright had an upcoming deposition less than 30 days away, so the plaintiffs could question him about it at that time.
Still, he did order the defendant to present the original copy, or at best, the oldest copy of the trust document, ruling that this would be relevant to the case.
Because “no intervening event has changed” his analysis since he denied plaintiffs’ request to order the defendant to produce a certain set of documents, Reinhart ruled that he wouldn’t reconsider this request, according to the opinion.
He continued and denied the plaintiffs’ request to order Wright to produce 122 videos connected to an investigation from the Australian Tax Office.
“Plaintiffs’ reply did not contest this factual representation by defendant,” wrote Reinhart. “Therefore, the request to compel the 122 videos is moot.”
As for the last request, Reinhart affirmed that the defendant didn’t have to produce documents from Wright connected to Bitcoin, trusts or Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym that Bitcoin was said to be founded under before Wright came forward as the founder.
The plaintiffs sued amid Wright’s conduct following Dave’s April 2013 death. He died just before Bitcoin went mainstream. Wright allegedly contacted Ira Kleiman and told him that he and Dave both created Bitcoin together. He also claimed that Dave Kleiman signed away his property rights in exchange for a share of an Australian company that was valued at millions of dollars. He also allegedly claimed he could sell Dave Kleiman’s stake in the company.
“This was a lie,” the lawsuit states. “The company went bankrupt after Craig apparently mislead the Australian Tax Office.”
Craig Wright allegedly went to London amid the investigation, and has since publicly announced that he’s the founder of Bitcoin. He’s also now the chief scientist of a UK company nChain and “regularly posts pictures of his social media accounts of his lavish lifestyle,” according to the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs subsequently sued Wright after he allegedly didn’t return the mined bitcoins or intellectual property to Dave Kleiman’s estate.