UK court rules Chinese law governs victims' claims to 61,000 seized bitcoin

A London court has ruled that ownership claims by fraud victims to more than 61,000 bitcoin seized by U.K. authorities must be decided under Chinese law, not English law. Mr Justice Turner of the High Court's King's Bench Division concluded in a judgment dated Oct. 12 that "the claims advanced by the Applicants do not engage English law as the governing law of the rights upon which they rely." CoinDesk said the ruling improves the chances that the U.K. government ends up keeping most of the bitcoin.

Where the 61,000 bitcoin came from

The bitcoin is linked to Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang. According to the facts set out in the judgment, Qian controlled Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology, a company in Tianjin, China, and ran around ten unlicensed investment schemes from 2014 until July 2017. An audit identified 128,409 investment contracts, and money received from victims totaled about 40.2 billion yuan (about £4.1 billion). Qian left China in 2017, traveled through Myanmar and arrived in London that September. The property seized in the U.K. includes more than 61,000 bitcoin.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said on Nov. 11, 2025, that Qian had been sentenced to 11 years and eight months at Southwark Crown Court. The CPS described it as the largest seizure of its kind in U.K. history and put the value of the seized cryptocurrency and other assets at about £4.8 billion. Separately from the criminal case, the CPS filed a civil recovery claim under the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) in September 2024. The latest judgment was issued within that civil case.

English trust law or Chinese contract law

Section 281 of POCA allows people who prove they own part of property subject to recovery to have that share returned. But the judgment noted that "it is necessary for any given Applicant to demonstrate a proprietary interest," and that a mere right to be repaid by the fraudsters is not enough. That made the choice of governing law the central question.

The court examined each of the four bases and rejected all of them. "The relevant damage occurred in China. The Applicants parted with their money in China," the judgment said. The ruling followed a three-day hearing on July 7-9 and further written submissions on July 20.

The ownership fight is not over

The ruling does not decide who owns the bitcoin. Turner said questions about the content, effect or proof of Chinese law are "matters for a later stage." According to the judgment, no evidence on the content of Chinese law has yet been put before the court. The victims will now have to show that they hold an ownership interest under Chinese law, and the judge said he would hear counsel on the precise form of the order following the judgment.

The judgment refers to the Applicants only as "many thousands of individual Applicants." Cointelegraph reported in March that law firm Candey represented about 5,700 victims, and CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, citing the Financial Times, reported that Fieldfisher, the law firm representing the Applicants, is pursuing an appeal. Any share that is not proven to belong to a claimant remains recoverable property under POCA.

61,000 bitcoin now worth about 6.9 trillion won

Bitcoin traded at $83,530 on Binance and 112.76 million won on Upbit as of 8:30 p.m. KST on Oct. 13. At that price, 61,000 bitcoin would be worth about $5.1 billion, or about 6.88 trillion won. At the same time, the Upbit price was about 1.2% higher than the Binance price converted to won, a gap known as the kimchi premium (the gap between prices on Korean exchanges and global markets).