Defunct Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox recently announced that the resolution to its ongoing bankruptcy case will be delayed by at least another six months. In a new update to Mt.Gox’s website, court-appointed trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi said that an order issued last month by the Tokyo District Court 20th Civil Division has pushed the claim-filing period and investigation deadlines back. Kobayashi seems well aware of many creditors’ calls to resolve the matter as urgently as possible, and the negative reaction the additional delay is likely to provoke. “Your patience would be very much appreciated,” he wrote in the update.
The original claim-filing deadline was set for November 28, but will instead be pushed back to May 29, 2015. Similarly, the investigation period for such claims was set to end on February 25 of next year, but will now be delayed until September 9. This means that it will be well over a year before the many claims against Mt.Gox can be fully settled, although it does not rule out the possibility that a settlement deal could be finalized and payments initiated before the deadlines.
At the moment, no mechanism currently exists to file claims against Mt.Gox directly. The company has directly contacted many of those who had verified accounts on the exchange, but given the large number of obscured, privacy focused users on the exchange and the labor-intensive process for verifying those claims, an extended filing and investigation process isn’t unexpected. Given the international nature of the exchange and the relatively slow Japanese civil court system, many experts have suggested that the Mt.Gox case could take years to fully resolve.
