Lawyers for Facebook claimed Thursday that they have discovered "smoking gun documents" showing that Paul Ceglia, who claims to possess a contract entitling him to a majority ownership stake in the company, fabricated the contract.
Ceglia is suing Facebook in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of New York on the basis of what he claims is a 2003 contract with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that gave Ceglia half of the company in return for his $1,000 investment, plus an extra 1 percent stake for every day Facebook was not online past January 1, 2004.
That supposedly gives Ceglia an 84 percent stake in Facebook, according to his calculations.
Facebook requested permission to examine Ceglia's documentation and computer in June. While the court has not yet granted the company's request to make its findings public, Facebook lawyers claimed Thursday that what they found proves that Ceglia's case is the work of an "inveterate scam artist," according to media reports.
"[Ceglia] does not want the public to know what was discovered on his computers, because it includes smoking-gun documents that conclusively establish that he fabricated the purported contract and that this entire lawsuit is a fraud and a lie," Facebook's attorneys wrote in a court filing.
Ceglia's relationship with Zuckerberg began in 2003, when the New York resident hired the then-Harvard student to do coding work for a company called StreetFax. Ceglia has passed a lie detector test that focused on the authenticity of his claimed contract with Zuckerberg, according to documentation filed by Ceglia's lawyers in June.