I attended the meeting with a whispering translator, who is up to date with the case and did a great job, so I feel I understood the meeting well.
There were about four creditors from the group who attended, and a few others creditors too. There were lots of lawyers too. One law firm sent a team of 5-6.
The first 35 minutes the trustee went through his report which you can see online. I thought he really took his time to explain the challenges we’re facing, and was more open and candid than he’s been in the past.
Acccounts:
Cash and deposits: total 69.5B jpy. It has decreased by 120mJPY [about $1m since last meeting].
15b JPY is in trust. [This is to guarantee the BK payout equality]
About 140K BTC and 140 BCH. He’s continuing to investigate the losses to see if there are any other recoveries.
He also acknowledged that there are Altcoins, and that creditors have the right to recoveries from the value they represent. [This is the first time he’s acknowledged this]
Self Assessment claims [Zombie claims]
He explained that the CR statute is different from the BK statute in that it dictates the requirement to create claims for all those who may have a claim, even if they don’t come forward.
He later listed the value of these. You can see them in Annex2 of his report.
Never filed zombie claims are worth 89k BTC
BK filed zombie claims are worth 44k BTC
Non exchange related claims
There are 7 creditors filing claims unrelated to the exchange.
He didn’t say it but these include Tibanne and Coinlab
[for background and not mentioned in the meeting, Tibanne’s claim relates to bitcoins owned by them which were being held in gox’s cold wallets. I’ve been told that typically BK claims between parent and child companies like this, are dismissed by the JP courts as a wash. 0 to everyone)
Checking your claim
Online claim filers can check their filing online
Offline claim filers will be emailed with the address they gave at time of filing.
[more on this in the questions.]
Future process
Both coinlab and tibanne have filed appeals against assessment
[FYI the process is, you file a claim, trustee rejects it, you apply for reassessment (which is generally called “assessment” and the court rules on it. If it’s rejected you can go to litigation, with 2 rounds of appeal to higher courts.- that whole process would take several years]
Tibanne has filed for reassessment of their 82kBTC, Coinlab has filed for reassessment of their $16b
Exchange related claims are worth 802kBTC [note compare that to 799kbtc under BK, it’s almost that same ammount, so opening to refiling hasn’t diluted our share – not withstanding zombie claims which are not included in that 802k total.]
This figure is open for review, up to the 29th of March, and creditors can file objections to these claims (both to approved ones, and rejected ones) before that date. [note this is what we are doing re zombie claims]
In total 1085k btc claims were filed but only 802k were accepted. You can see the list at the court.
Decisions that are rejected under (re)assessment can file a petition with the court between 30march and 7 May. After that their claim has no more standing.
The trustee continues to investigat the theft but due to a scarcity of information he’s not built a full picture of what happens.
The US DoJ brought charges against Vinnik, Part of charges were that he obtained value from Mt Gox. Depending on outcome of that trial and investigation, there may be some recoveries.
Tibanne is in BK, It has rejected the claim made against it by the truestee of mt gox. And that claim is now under re(assessment).
MK is in BK, [not sure I understood this right]. Mt Gox claim against MK for 20m JPY, He was found not-guilty of fraud, but guilty of manipulation of records and has a suspended sentence.
Moving from BK to CR means he has had to inform outside jurisdictions that this has happend. [He kind of snuck this past everyone, but I think what this means that there are other stayed lawsuits against Mt Gox outside Japan, which can recomense again now, that Gox isn’t under BK protection. – I’ve heard not from a lawyer, that this could lead to other claims against the CR entity futher down the road.]
The deadline for the CR plan submission is April 26th, but due to coinlab and tibanne case, he will not meet this deadline. [more on this in the questions]
Questions
Andy’s Qs:
Is coinlab’s claim size an abuse of process – didn’t answer it specifically. Wada was in the room, and on record it’s not surprising, but I wanted to ask the question in front of the judge. I discussed this as a strategy with Sekido. I will follow up when I meat him on Friday in private. But what’s good about that is that he didn’t say no.
The Trustee and Coinlab will make submissions to the court, and judgement in the coinlab case will come “as soon as possible” – no indication on that being days and weeks months years decades…
Voting rights for coinlab. Part of assessing the claim is to asses the voting rights that go with that claim. Coinlab’s claim was rejected so got 0 voting rights. However creditors can apeal to the court to exercise their voting rights, so the court will decide. Coinlab’s claim is enormous so the court will decide, and there is a big question over how this will be handled.
The process (CR plan filing) will be delayed until assessment is finished. I can’t say when we will have a report.
[The way my notes read it sounds like they can file a CR plan after assessment while litigation goes on, but I got the impression in the meeting he meant that he can’t file CR until litigation is settled – I’ll check with Sekido and the Trustee about this]
“I can’t say when we’ll have the report ready.”
How to voting will work. No decision yet, [this means they can’t confirm it yet but…] We have made the online system, I would like to use it. ultimately we have to get a decision on this from the court.
Communicating with creditors, he takes the point that the english comms are bad and will look at doing something better in future.
L. Flemming’s lawyer asked: about coinlab’s claim being partially approved.
Chart has 6 rows for 7 creditors so that approved number doesn’t neccessarily apply to coinlab. It’s split by denomination. not claimant.
CR means reastart process. under BK already rejected coinlab. But we know substance of argument. Considered already under BK. This will speed things up. If the claimant not satisfied, they can bring trial proceedings, so hard to say when we will reach a conclusion. No clear date that we can give you.
[this is the bit that makes me think they won’t start CR until Coinlab has been through the courts]
Another Q
How to verify offline claims? Results by email. When? not yet sent? Is email going to claimant or to representative. Is there another way to verify outcome? Offline claims, can they not go online. It would be better if you verified all claims online.
Answer: Working on email at the moment, issue shortly. Email address supplied by claimant. Website security is an issue. Because of that offline claims are staying offline. Under law, submitted outcome to court, go to court to get results
Fukuoka’s collegue Q. Self admitted claims. Breakdown – BK and non BK zombie claims. What you gonna do about it?
Answer: Under CR proposal still assessing how to deal with this. Not yet come up with any policy.
[A politicians answer, which I think is good. the fact that they’ve split these out, makes it easy for us to object. They are expecting our objection. I’ll be discussing BK zombies on friday]
Maurice lawyer: [This is J Maurice? aka Wiz, former partner in Wizsec] Do you Plan to establish an exchange, to make settlements, how are you thinking of distributing.
Answer A plan is not finalised yet. But I’ll give you my understanding. While we have started CR, Gox is no longer in business, so I don’t think we’d be able to have that exchange adopted. So it comes down to how we distribute in cash or crypto.
Crypto – we are not able to use blockchain to pay it out, (direct payments) so we would have to use an exchange to do that. Significance of using exchange is that it would involve creditors to sign up as users. We pay exchange, exchange distributes settlement, We would use the creditor account balance as a reciept for settlement.
Lawyer Q: on Cash or BTC? If you are liquidating more are you doing it the same way as before. Are you able do disclose method for liquidating.
Answer If we decide we should sell btc, consult with court and use appropriate method. Still not decided.
Trustee asked for a show of hands, given the price drop from last meeting, on who want BTC and who wants him to sell. No hands for selling, lots of hands for BTC. [I think he’s getting it] he also said he would be using the online system to collect opinions on this again.
Judge: Next meeting 1st of October. 1h30pm. Same venue.
Andy Pag – These are my notes, which may contain errors and should not be used to base legal or financial decisions on. I am not a lawyer. This does not constitute legal advice.