Lynn Wright has made another filing in the case of the estate of David Kleiman, this time an expedited motion asking for a declaration from the Court that Ira has no authority to use W&K to sue Dr. Craig Wright.
Lynn, the ex-wife of Dr. Wright, had originally petitioned the Court, claiming ownership of a portion of W&K Info Defence, which Ira Kleiman is using as a vehicle for his billion-plus dollar lawsuit against Dr. Wright. In that case, Ira Kleiman is purporting to sue Wright on behalf of W&K, a company which was allegedly part-owned by his late brother David. Lynn’s ownership claim is awkward for Ira, because he has represented to various courts that he has a controlling interest in the company. Now, the best evidence we have about the actual operation of W&K shows that was a lie.
Lynn, with proof that she has a significant interest in W&K, is asking for a formal declaration that Ira Kleiman was never authorized to use the company to sue Dr. Wright. Up until Lynn’s appearance, Ira was unable to produce any real evidence regarding the structure of W&K, which according to him is the rightful owner of a share in billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin and associated intellectual property, this apparently despite having no idea that another member of the company even existed.
Lynn’s argument rests on the Chapter 605 of the Florida Statutes, part of a section which governs limited liability companies. There, it says that any interest which is transferred to a non-member (such as in the event of a members’ death) does not entitle the transferee to participate in management of the company, or the conduct of its affairs. According to the Statute, all that the legal representative of a member is allowed to do is exercise the member’s corporate rights for the purpose of selling their estate or administering their property.
This appears a straightforward exercise in statutory interpretation.
Ira, after previously submitting that the value of Dave Kleiman’s estate does not exceed $6,000, now contends that the estate has a share of W&K and that the company is owed billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin and as-yet unspecified intellectual property. The only way Ira can get his hands on this money, in his mind, is to use his position as executor of his brother’s estate to direct W&K to sue for it. But according to the plain words of the Florida Statutes, when the alleged interest in the company transferred to Ira as the personal representative of the estate, he gained zero management rights over W&K. In fact, the relevant sections are very narrow in terms of what transferees are legally able to do. According to law, Ira is no more entitled to cause W&K to sue Craig Wright than anyone else.
And yet, Ira has done just that, embarking on years’ long litigation in pursuit of assets he can’t know exist, and indeed didn’t think existed until shortly before filing the lawsuit against Wright. The fact that Ira has at various times represented to the courts that he had a controlling interest in W&K looks more like fraud each day, as thanks to Lynn’s appearance, we now know neither he nor his brother had any controlling interest in W&K at the time of David’s death. To the extent that his brother’s interest transferred to Ira after his death, Ira was legally only able to use that interest in a very narrow way. He was certainly not able to use it to sue another member of the company.
The expedited petition makes sense given one of her partners in W&K may be being improperly sued for over a billion dollars. For Ira’s part, he can’t have been expecting that one of the founding members of W&K would appear and undermine his case against Dr. Wright, but that shouldn’t be surprising, because Ira has evidently been stabbing in the dark in the hopes that he can inflate Dave Kleiman’s assets from under $6,000 to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
The Court will hear both this motion and Ira Kleiman’s motion to dismiss Lynn’s initial petition at 3 p.m. on December 3, 2020.
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