Craig Wright v Peter McCormack
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Mr Justice Chamberlain |
| Judgment Date | 21 December 2022 |
| Neutral Citation | [2022] EWHC 3343 (KB) |
| Docket Number | Case No: QB-2019-001430 |
| Court | King's Bench Division |
[2022] EWHC 3343 (KB)
Mr Justice Chamberlain
Case No: QB-2019-001430
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
KING'S BENCH DIVISION
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS LIST
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Joshua Munro, Greg Callus and Lily Walker-Parr (instructed by Ontier LLP) for the Claimant
Catrin Evans KC, Ben Silverstone and George McDonald (instructed by RPC – Reynolds Porter Chamberlain) for the Defendant
Hearing date: 20 December 2022
Approved Judgment
This judgment was handed down remotely at 10.30am on [date] by circulation to the parties or their representatives by e-mail and by release to the National Archives.
Introduction
This judgment deals with matters ancillary to the judgment I handed down on 1 August 2022: [2022] EWHC 2068 (QB), [2023] EMLR 2. The background is set out there. The following short summary suffices for present purposes.
Craig Wright claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto (“Satoshi”), the inventor of Bitcoin. Peter McCormack tweeted and said in a recorded discussion that Dr Wright is not Satoshi and that his claims to be Satoshi are fraudulent. Dr Wright brought a claim for libel against Mr McCormack. Dr Wright established at trial that some of Mr McCormack's publications were defamatory and caused serious harm to his reputation at the time when they were made.
It is important to be clear that Dr Wright has not established that he is Satoshi. He did not have to, because in this jurisdiction, once a claimant shows that a publication is defamatory and has caused serious harm to his reputation, it is for the defendant to establish that the publication is true. Mr McCormack initially advanced a defence that what he said about Dr Wright was true (among other defences), but later abandoned that defence (and others). The reason he gave for doing so was that the cost of a trial on that issue would be prohibitive for him.
Ordinarily, a claimant in Dr Wright's position would be entitled to substantial damages. In this case, however, I decided that he should have only nominal damages of £1. The reason was that, in an attempt to establish that Mr McCormack's publications had caused serious harm to his reputation, an essential element of a defamation claim, Dr Wright had advanced a deliberately false case until shortly before trial. When the falsity was exposed, he changed his case, explaining that he had made inadvertent errors. I rejected that explanation as untrue.
As I noted in my judgment, this was not the first occasion on which Dr Wright's evidence to a court has been found to be unreliable. I set out at [87]–[88] of my judgment some excerpts from the decisions of two United States federal judges, who came to the same conclusion. Since I gave judgment, my attention has been drawn to the observations of Butcher J, sitting in the Commercial Court in this jurisdiction, who found Dr Wright to be an unsatisfactory witness in many respects: Ang v Relantco Investments [2020] EWHC 3242 (Comm), at [49]. Subsequently, in proceedings between Dr Wright and Magnus Granath, District Court Judge Helen Engebrigtsen of the Oslo District Court in Norway held on 20 October 2022 that Mr Granath had “ample factual basis to claim that Wright had lied and cheated in his attempt to prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto”.
Shortly after I gave judgment, RPC, the solicitors acting for the defendant, drew my attention to information which appeared to indicate a breach by Dr Wright of the embargo subject to which the draft judgment had been communicated to the parties.
There are, accordingly, four issues before me today:
(a) What action should I take, if any, in relation to the alleged breach of the embargo on my draft judgment?
(b) What injunctive relief, if any, should I grant to prevent Mr McCormack from repeating the statements giving rise to this claim?
(c) Should Dr Wright have permission to appeal against my decision to award him only nominal damages?
(d) Costs.
Breach of the embargo
I produced my judgment in draft a few days before it was handed down. It was sent to counsel under embargo at 3.06pm on Tuesday 26 July 2022 and had on its face the usual warning:
“IN CONFIDENCE
This is a judgment to which the Practice Direction supplementing CPR Part 40 applies. It will be handed down on 1 August 2022 at 12.00 noon. This draft is confidential to the parties and their legal representatives and accordingly neither the draft itself nor its substance may be disclosed to any other person or used in the public domain. The parties must take all reasonable steps to ensure that its confidentiality is preserved. No action is to be taken (other than internally) in response to the draft before judgment has been formally pronounced. A breach of any of these obligations may be treated as a contempt of court…”
The relevant Practice Direction supplementing CPR Part 40 is CPR 40E PD. It provides in material part as follows:
“2.4 A copy of the draft judgment may be supplied, in confidence, to the parties provided that –
(a) neither the draft judgment nor its substance is disclosed to any other person or used in the public domain; and
(b) no action is taken (other than internally) in response to the draft judgment, before the judgment is handed down.
…
2.8 Any breach of the obligations or restrictions under paragraph 2.4… may be treated as contempt of court.”
Later on the evening of 26 July 2022, Dr Wright posted three messages on the “#bitcoin-general” channel of the MetaNet workspace of the Slack messaging platform. (Slack is a platform designed for business use on which members can establish “workspaces” on which to communicate. Each workspace has “channels” dedicated to particular topics on which members can have conversations.) The MetaNet workspace was established by MetaNet ICU Ltd, a company established to promote industry education in relation to Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (“BSV”), a product which Dr Wright and Calvin Ayre together promote. It has 340 active members. The “#bitcoin-general” channel has 290 members.
Dr Wright's messages were as follows:
“If a person would spend 4 million to receive a dollar plus and 2 million costs…
So the other side is bankrupt…
What would you think? (edited)”
“Ie.
The only thing that matters is crushing other side”
“Well.
I would spend 4 million to make an enemy pay 1.”
Between 3.27pm on 29 July 2022 and 11.35am on 1 August 2022, Calvin Ayre (Dr Wright's “mentor” and business partner) posted a number of tweets including one in the following terms:
“Just as Craig won in Satoshi trial in Florida and IEEE now accept he is Satoshi, he has won in UK also and many more will now come to this same fact based conclusion. the trolls of injustice are losing to truth”.
These matters were brought to the attention of Dr Wright's solicitors, Ontier, by an email of 4 August 2022. They drew the matter to my attention on 5 August 2022 and filed a “report” on 11 August 2022. In the copy sent to Mr McCormack's solicitors, parts of the report were redacted where reference was made to matters which Ontier considered to be privileged and/or confidential.
The report says this:
“17. Dr Wright has informed us of the following:
17.1 The purpose of the post was not to give any indication as to the outcome set out in the Draft Judgment. The purpose of the post was to encourage debate amongst the members of the Slack Channel and to give an indication of Dr Wright's dogged approach to his opponents in the digital assets sphere generally; and
17.2. Dr Wright does not recall ever mentioning to members of the Slack Channel that the usual practice of the Court is to circulate a draft version of the judgment to the parties in confidence before it becomes public, and he does not believe that this practice would be common knowledge amongst members of the channel. As we explain below, there was nothing in Dr Wright's message (or any other message posted at around that time) to indicate that a draft judgment was imminent or had been received.”
Attached to Ontier's report were copies of the replies to his messages. Ontier say that these do not indicate that anyone thought Dr Wright was referring to this litigation or was in receipt of a draft judgment. That being so, Ontier say this:
“23… Dr Wright does not believe that his posts on the Slack Channel breached the Embargo and it was certainly not his intention to do so. However, to the extent that Dr Wright's posts are or may be considered by the Court to be a breach of the Embargo, Dr Wright unreservedly apologises to the Court and wishes to emphasise that any such breach was entirely unintentional and inadvertent.”
As to Mr Ayre's tweet, Ontier say this:
“28. Mr Ayre has confirmed to us that:
28.1. His view has always been that when Mr McCormack dropped his defence of truth, Dr Wright had proved that he had been defamed and had effectively won the litigation;
28.2. He was not aware of the outcome of the litigation prior to the handing down of the Judgment at noon on Monday 1 August. This is notwithstanding the emails at paragraphs referred to at paragraphs 35 to 44 below. Given he did not know the outcome of the case, he could not have been in breach of the Embargo;
28.3. His tweets were expressing his view that Dr Wright had already succeeded in the case when Mr McCormack dropped his defence of truth. Indeed, Mr Ayre had tweeted on various occasions prior to provision of the Draft Judgment that Dr Wright had been successful in the case. By way of example:
28.3.1. Mr Ayre's tweet of 19 May 2022 at 11:02 pm (BST), stated that the trial in these proceedings “…will be boring… Craig won already…this is only about how much money McCormack owes…”;
28.3.2. Mr Ayre's tweet of 24 May 2022 at 6:36 am (BST), stated that Dr Wright “…won...
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