In a series of public statements, transparency reports and emails, Wau Holland Stiftung has provided different explanations for a €1.7 million payment made as part of their handling of Julian Assange’s legal fund. The recipients of the funds have changed slightly with each telling, ranging from various Assange Campaign organizations to Julian Assange’s half-brother Gabriel Shipton.
In early 2022, AssangeDAO formed and raised over $50 million worth of ETH to help free Julian Assange, who was then imprisoned in Belmarsh and fighting extradition to the United States. As preparations launch the DAO were being made (and originally independent of it), the Assange family had arranged for Pak to auction off an NFT collaboration with Julian Assange to help raise money for his legal fund.
On April 8th 2022, after being entrusted with the proceeds of the AssangeDAO auction, Wau Holland Stiftung transferred 580.775 ETH (approximately €1.7 million at the time) to a new gnosis wallet address, and has since provided three different explanations for the payment. The uniting element of these narratives is that the payment was a commission fee, though the details of who it was paid to has changed with each iteration.
In their initial explanation, Wau Holland Stiftung tweeted an announcement that the payment was “a commission fee for brokering the NFT donation” that was being paid to Assange Campaign Australia “in order for [them] to continue their work defending Julian Assange and his human rights.”
A week later, as members of the AssangeDAO community prepared for a community call with Gabriel Shipton, they had questions about how the commission had come to be. The community had been caught off guard by the announcement, and wanted to know why it had been arranged “behind the scenes,” in what sense Assange Campaign Australia had brokered the NFT donation, and how the amount for the commission fee had been determined.
Gabriel Shipton replied that the important thing was “that the ETH is being used for its intended purpose.” He explained that the ETH was “needed in Australia ASAP” because it was a critical time for the campaign, pointing to a then imminent ruling in Julian’s extradition case and the 2022 Australian election, while emphasizing that Assange Campaign Inc. is a not for profit organization. He ended his post by saying that Wau Holland Stiftung’s tweet could have been phrased better, but that they were being transparent in how the ETH was being distributed.
Members of the AssangeDAO forum interpreted this as meaning that the payment was simply to support Assange Campaign Australia’s activities, and wasn’t meant to cover NFT auction expenses. Gabriel partially confirmed this, saying that the work had been done pro bono and that the ETH would support Assange Campaign Australia’s work.
In June and November 2024, Wau Holland Stiftung released a pair of transparency reports which labeled the payment as having been made to Assange Campaign International. It is unclear what Assange Campaign International is, and if it is a legal entity or not. Members of Wau Holland Stiftung have been what it is on multiple occassions and declined to answer. According to a twitter thread by Silke Noa which was reported by Binance, Assange Campaign International “funded the extensive Assange Australia campaign” and may suffer from “a rather unfortunate naming.”
In February 2025, screenshots of emails from Wau Holland Stiftung surfaced which seem to provide a third narrative, an odd synthesis of some of the statements previously provided by Wau Holland Stiftung and Gabriel Shipton. However, the email’s author noted that they were describing events from memory. According to the screenshots, which were posted by AssangeDAO member su dongpo, the payment was a “finder’s fee” that was paid to Gabriel Shipton rather than the Assange Campaign. The reasoning behind this was that while the Assange Campaign was a not for profit association, it was not a charitable organization.
Therefore, we would not have been able to transfer funds to it apart from concrete projects, which always put a high administrative overhead on us. The way out was to declare the payment a “finders fee”, which is possible under German charity law. Therefore we transferred 3.5% of Pac’s [sic] ETH donation to an ETH account that had been set up by Gabriel.
While Wau Holland Stiftung’s understanding was that Gabriel would use the funds for Assange Campaign Inc, it is unclear if or how that has been reviewed or enforced. As of this writing, slightly over 113.5 ETH of the original 580 ETH remain in the gnosis wallet. Public records indicate that Assange Campaign Inc. has not filed any annual statements which might shed light on the matter or held any annual meetings since February 10, 2022, two days before Pak transferred the AssangeDAO funds to Wau Holland Stiftung.
Mysteriously, in 2023 Wau Holland Stiftung left an internal document at EasterHegg 20 which states that the transfer was a commission and that the funds would go towards campaign costs in Australia. What is noticeably different, however, is that the internal document places the commission fee at 5%, rather than the publicly declared 3.5%. Wau Holland Stiftung has declined to explain the discrepancy.
Repeated inquiries to the Assange Campaign Australia have gone unanswered. Initial inquiries to Wau Holland Stiftung were met with silence, while later inquiries were met with an invitation to Easterhegg for their talk and a question and session session, quickly followed by accusations from a Wau Holland Stiftung board member that I was someone else who was secretly acting as a proxy for myself. After demonstrating to them that I had clearly identified myself, I received an apology but no answers.
As EasterHegg approached, I asked Wau Holland Stiftung about attending virtually, and received no response. A recording of the event shows that none of the questions I had attempted to raise with them were addressed or acknowledged.
It remains unclear where the €1.7 million transfer was sent and who controls it, or if the commission fee was related to the Assange family using their veto to force the AssangeDAO to bid its entire treasury, beating the second highest bid by $40 million. It appears that answers are unlikely to be forthcoming.
