Court Dismisses Coinlab’s MT Gox Claim

The Japanese court has largely dismissed a claim by Peter Vessenes‘ company Coinlab for $16 billion, awarding instead just about $4 million.

The MT Gox trustee said in an update at the creditors meeting held on Tuesday:

“On August 30, 2019, the Court issued its decision on the petition for claim assessment filed by CoinLab, Inc., under which JPY 384,857,605 and delay damages thereon were approved.”

It’s not clear whether this now settles the matter as the trustee said “CoinLab, Inc. could file an appeal against the assessment,” with it unclear how long they have to file such potential appeal.

There’s moreover a claim by Tibanne Co, the former parent company of MT Gox owned by Mark Karpeles, its then CEO.

Tibanne has entered its own bankruptcy, and their trustee is apparently pursuing a claim for 82,500 bitcoins.

Because Tibanne has filed an appeal against the court’s decision to side with the MT Gox trustee, and because Coinlab could potentially do the same, any redistribution is likely to take some time depending on how long the appeal court takes.

That’s as MT Gox’s trustee said the “existence of a large amount of the claims is undetermined, which makes it difficult to prepare a Draft Rehabilitation Plan.”

That is, no redistribution yet, with complex bankruptcy cases like MT Gox usually taking about six years.

Five have gone already, so it may not be long now until the assets are returned to bitcoiners for the first time since February 2014 when the MT Gox website went off-line.

There are thousands such creditors who in combination are to receive a total of about $600 million in dollars, and 141,686 bitcoin as well as about the same amount of BCH.

That’s a total of about $2 billion, so a 4x gain since 2014 when the entire claim of assets was half a billion for one million bitcoins.

That’s based on around 20%-25% of some one million bitcoins with 800,000 million BTC lost. Giving creditors around 25 cent per dollar, which still puts them in significant profit because bitcoin’s price has risen by quite a bit.

The distribution of these bitcoins is likely to be in bitcoin perhaps through Kraken with it unclear when this will happen, but it should be soon after the appeal court’s decision.