And that to the tune of half a million US$...

Maybe it's "just me" but for that kind of money I'd be communicating with my local and respectable lawyers with all the legalised documentation instead of here on BCTC...
That's another thing, Steven has already said it isn't half a million quid's-worth of bitcoin he is trying to recover. The discussion earlier in this thread about the bitcoin transactions shown from 2012/13 were exactly that, transactions. As far as I am aware he is looking to recover an undisclosed amount of bitcoin from his locked BTC-E account which, while he has pointed out they are worth considerably more now than they were back then, are nowhere near the 'hundreds of thousands' of dollars-worth people keep bringing up.