Welcome to Satoshi Itches Thursday, March 28 2024 @ 08:18 PM UTC

One trustee of the Tulip Trust didn't exist until 2014

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Craig Wright has just submitted a sworn declaration giving details about his blind trusts. One of them, Tulip Trust I, was formalised in October 2012, and one of the trustees is listed as C01N Ltd. However, no company of that name existed in 2012, and the company that later became C01N Ltd seems to have had no association with Craig until 2014.

The relevant parts of the declaration are as follows:

  • In October 2012, a formal trust document was executed, creating a trust whose corpus included the Bitcoin that I mined, acquired and would acquire in the future. The name of that trust is Tulip Trust.
  • While the trustee was initially David Kleiman, additional trustees were appointed upon the execution of the formal trust document.
  • The trustees for Tulip Trust I are: a) the company in the UK registered by #redacted, which is C01N Ltd. UK. This company was dissolved on July 4th, 2017.

Companies House have a website where you can look up all kinds of information about UK limited companies. They have all the details about C01N Ltd. including the date it was formed, when directors were appointed, etc.

The company was initially formed as Design by Human Ltd on the 11th of October 2012. Its directors were CFS Secretaries Limited, and Mr Bryan Thornton. This has all the appearances of a pre-made "off the shelf" company created to sell on later. As can be seen, Mr Thornton has been associated with 146 companies, which fits with him being part of an "off the shelf" company broker.

On the 14th of October 2013 the company filed an annual return, showing that CFS and Mr Thornton were still the only directors of the company. On the 15th of October the company name was changed to Moving Forward in Business Limited.

On the 7th of January 2014, the following all happened:

  • The company name was changed to C01N Ltd
  • Both CFS and Mr Thornton were removed as company directors
  • Craig Wright was appointed both director and company secretary

Therefore it seems highly likely Craig bought this company in January 2014. He does not appear to have had any relationship with it before this date.

On the 10th of April 2014, Miss Uyen Nguyen was appointed as director. However, the appointment was backdated to the 12th of October 2012, when the company was a newly created dormant company which had nothing to do with Craig Wright or Uyen. This appears to be part of some other potential scam involving the Australian Tax Office, as detailed in this reddit post.

So Craig has sworn in court that a trustee of Tulip Trust I is C01N Ltd, which did not exist until 2014. Note that Bryan Thornton is still active on Companies House (he was listed as becoming the director of a company three days ago on June 17th). It might be interesting to talk to him and find out the true history of Design By Human, and if Craig had any involvement pre-2014.