Facebook Inc. said its discovery of an “authentic contract” between its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and Paul Ceglia shows the New York man’s claims to part-ownership of the company are phony.
The document, which doesn’t mention Facebook, was found on Ceglia’s computer, embedded in electronic data from 2004, according to papers filed by Facebook on Monday in federal court in Buffalo, N.Y. It refers only to StreetFax, a company Ceglia was trying to start at the time.
Facebook attached a blurry image of the contract to its court papers. The document, dated April 28, 2003, appears to include signatures by Zuckerberg and Ceglia and a handwritten addition to the contract’s terms.
“The court-ordered forensic testing has uncovered the authentic contract between Mark Zuckerberg and StreetFax that Ceglia attempted to conceal,” Facebook said in its filing. “This smoking-gun evidence confirms what defendants have said all along: the purported contract attached to the complaint is an outright fabrication.”
If the contract included in Monday’s Facebook filing proves to be genuine, it would doom Ceglia’s claim to part-ownership of the world’s biggest social-networking site. Facebook is valued at $69.2 billion, according to , an online marketplace for shares of privately held companies.
Ceglia claims in his suit filed last year that Zuckerberg agreed to give him a share of Facebook in exchange for $1,000 in startup money.
“This ‘image’ they claim is the original is forged and we will prove it has no authenticating properties whatsoever,” Ceglia said in an e-mail sent from Ireland, where he is living.
