Obviously someone in this whole mess is lying or grossly misinformed, the problem is figuring out who.
He said he had IT-experts testify in court that the emails had been tampered with, I assume one could look into that in some kind of public record over the case?
To be honest, whilst I wouldn't necessarily trust his partner trying to save his own skin, I'm even less convinced by someone that mentions a sale price of $3 for a Windows 7 and $4 for XP (odd pricing, but maybe reflects how convincing the counterfeit disks were or even how usable the software is without a license key...) in their defence in court, then tells the media he intended to give them away at $0.25 cost price.
Sometimes you have to look past the fact one party is a recycling entrepreneur and the other party is Microsoft...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7hnVYMoctM
EDIT: The court documents were linked in another comment, I relink it: https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/FIN...