In their first court filing since Roger Ver’s arrest in Spain in April, attorneys for the cryptocurrency advocate known as Bitcoin Jesus, Roger Ver, sought a US judge to reject his tax evasion indictment.
Ver, 45, was accused by US authorities of filing a fake exit tax return after he renounced his US citizenship in 2014 and of avoiding more than $48 million in taxes for selling $240 million worth of tokens. As Ver awaits a Spanish judge’s ruling on whether to extradite him to the most prestigious US tax case involving just cryptocurrency holdings, the legal salvo was launched.
Ver’s attorneys contended in a federal court in Los Angeles on Tuesday that the Internal Revenue Service’s exit tax, which is imposed on US residents who leave the country with assets exceeding $2 million, is unconstitutional and unnecessarily ambiguous. They claimed that prosecutors misquestioned a Ver attorney and disregarded evidence that he had no intention of breaking the law.
According to Ver’s lawyers, the exit tax unfairly requires expatriates to pay millions of dollars in taxes that would not be applicable to anybody else.
Prosecutors claim that Ver concealed the quantity and value of Bitcoin he possessed and controlled, both directly and through his California-based businesses, MemoryDealers and Agilestar, because he intended to leave the country. Prosecutors claim that Ver underreported the value of his firms on an exit tax return submitted in 2016 and neglected to disclose the Bitcoin he personally possessed while working with an appraiser and law firm on the exit tax, giving them misleading information about his holdings.
However, Ver’s attorneys contended that the prosecution disregarded proof that he had no intention of breaking US tax law.
In order to avoid future IRS issues, I want to make sure that my departure tax payments are as clean as possible. According to the petition, Ver wrote in an email in 2013.
Ver is also accused in the indictment of dishonestly misrepresenting and hiding from the IRS the cryptocurrency that his companies sold for roughly $240 million in 2017. However, the complaint alleges that in the absence of clear advice on how the tax laws related to cryptocurrency, Ver and his previous attorneys attempted to determine what he owed the US.
“The government has never been able to articulate the taxes purportedly owed,” they stated, despite the fact that Ver had been in contact with them for a long time about a civil resolution of this situation. While Ver’s previous counsel believed that talks were still going on, the US revealed his indictment instead of carrying on those discussions in good faith.
Additionally, Ver’s attorneys contended that IRS officials had breached his attorney-client privilege in December 2017 by interviewing one of his tax attorneys without prior notice. The US Supreme Court heard a case on the matter in 2022 that matched Ver’s conditions but did not identify the parties. In 2023, the court dismissed that lawsuit without rendering a decision.
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“They just came at me in every direction because they don’t like me and my political beliefs,” Ver added.
Ver claimed that he spends his days training Brazilian jiujitsu, conversing with his lawyers on Zoom, and hosting friends who are traveling from abroad. He claimed to have been favorably greeted at Bitcoin meetups.
Ver welcomed the promise of crypto when it first emerged. He began purchasing Bitcoin in 2011 for less than $1, promoting the idea of adopting cryptocurrency and highlighting its advantages. His evangelistic support of the initial cryptocurrency earned him the nickname “Bitcoin Jesus.”
He was an early investor in digital asset business Ripple, payment processor BitPay, and cryptocurrency company Blockchain.com, which was once valued at $14 billion. In 2017, Ver left the community and moved to a separate entity known as Bitcoin Cash when the Bitcoin network received a software update that he disliked. According to him, he currently owns Ether, Zano, Bitcoin, and Bitcoin Cash.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department chose not to comment.
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Bloomberg L.P., 2024.
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