With the case between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple still waiting for its outcome, i.e., the decision on the amount of damages that the blockchain firm will have to pay over its XRP sales to institutions, the two sides continue to fire motions at each other.
As it happens, Ripple’s legal team has filed a Motion to Strike new expert materials that the SEC has submitted in support of its Motion for Remedies and Entry of Final Judgement, in addition to filing its Opposition to this Motion, defense attorney James K. Filan shared on April 23.
Specifically, Filan, who is also a former federal prosecutor and popular commenter on the Ripple v. SEC case, has informed his followers about the motions in question in two posts on his X profile, alongside attaching the documents that detail these motions.
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SEC ‘sandbagging’ the case?
Indeed, according to the document of Ripple’s Motion to Strike the SEC’s new expert materials “in the form of a declaration and two supporting exhibits prepared by new expert witness Andrea Fox,” arguing that Fox’s declaration represents ill-timed “sandbagging”:
“The SEC waited until the filing of its remedies motion to submit the Fox Declaration setting forth its remedies theories and calculations. (…) The SEC’s untimely submission is ‘precisely the type of ‘sandbagging’ that Rule 37 (c)(1) is designed to prevent. It should be struck.”
Ripple opposes the remedies
Furthermore, in regard to Ripple’s Opposition to the SEC’s Motion for Remedies and Entry of Final Judgement, the document states that the regulator has failed to justify the likelihood of future violations or reckless disregard for the law, nor the necessity of an injunction, among other things.
On top of that, Ripple’s team stressed that any civil penalty higher than $10 million total would be unfair and inappropriate, “taking both discretionary and comparative factors into account,” and that the court should deny the SEC’s requests that exceed this amount.
As a reminder, the securities watchdog has demanded that Ripple pay a face-melting $2 billion in damages for its sales of XRP to institutional buyers, which Judge Analisa Torres ruled were securities sales, as opposed to retail purchases.
Meanwhile, the XRP token, which has been at the center of the legal battle, was at press time changing hands at the price of $0.5446, recording an increase of 2.37% in the last 24 hours, advancing 10.95% across the previous seven days, albeit losing 13.51% on its monthly chart, as per data on April 23.
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