Roger Ver ready to fight over $50M in BTC taxes
Bitcoin Jesus is arguing that the Department of Justice’s tax fraud charges are “unconstitutional”
Bitcoin investor Roger Ver | Jessica Louise Bernard/LeWeb13 Conference/"Martin Bryant The Next Web, Anthony Gallippi, Shakil Khan, Roger Ver (1)" (CC license)
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Bitcoin Jesus will not go quietly into the night…or pay $50 million in alleged unpaid taxes.
Roger Ver, who was arrested in Spain in April of this year, is arguing that the Department of Justice’s tax fraud charges are “unconstitutional.”
The DOJ filed a “defective indictment,” Ver’s lawyers say, that misquotes communications between Ver and his legal teams and — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — “hangs on a semblance of regulatory clarity that never existed.”
Ver’s defense claims that Bitcoin Jesus tried to get ahead of the murky tax code in 2014 (which, to be fair, is still a bit unclear 10 years on) by hiring an unnamed law firm to consult on his decision to leave the US. As part of that, they conducted a hypothetical scenario where Ver sold all of his holdings, but the thing is, as Ver’s lawyers explained, he couldn’t sell his bitcoin back in 2014.
“On March 2, 2014, however, such a sale was likely impossible as a technological matter and catastrophic as a matter of market value. At the time, BTC was a thinly traded market with a limited number of active traders,” the filing said. And, unfortunately, the only marketplace to really sell off large amounts of bitcoin was Mt. Gox — which had just collapsed.
So Ver, along with multiple tax experts and attorneys, had basically tried to calculate unrealized gains and exit taxes with all that in mind. Per his lawyers, Ver was also exploring the cost if he was personally on the hook for bitcoin held by his companies.
Obviously, with this being a tax case, there’s a lot of back and forth about the unrealized gains, and Ver’s previous communications regarding his bitcoin sales and how he recorded his bitcoin holdings. But essentially, the motion to dismiss falls back on the fact that the current tax code — and by current, I also mean the framework that existed in 2014 — didn’t really account for crypto.
The indictment relies “on impermissibly vague laws that, at all relevant times, provided no basis for a person of reasonable intelligence to understand the proper application of tax laws to digital currencies; and they rely on the government’s persistent trampling on basic rights and notions of fair play,” his team argued.
The timing of this filing is what’s really interesting. Ver is set, as of right now, for a trial in lower Manhattan starting in early February of next year that could see him potentially extradited to the US. We’ve talked endlessly about the incoming administration and its seemingly favorable view of crypto and Manhattan prosecutors, to this point, are already reducing the amount of crypto cases they go after.
Whether or not Bitcoin Jesus can succeed in getting his case tossed is up to the judge at this point, but I bet his team feels there couldn’t have been a more perfect time for this filing.
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