Following the recent remarks that the chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, made before the 2023 Securities Enforcement Forum, the chief legal officer at Ripple, Stuart Alderoty, criticized him for having “prejudged” the entire cryptocurrency sector.
Specifically, Gensler was quoting the first SEC chair, Joseph P. Kennedy, who said that the agency comprised “partners of honest business and prosecutors of dishonesty,” and Alderoty pointed out that the securities regulator sued Ripple “but never charged it with ‘dishonesty,’” as he said in an X post on November 17.
According to the legal expert, the SEC had prejudged the “failed case” against Ripple, “beginning with the ethically compromised Bill Hinman,” referring to the former SEC enforcement division director whose speech became one of the key pieces of evidence the blockchain company’s defense used in the lawsuit.
As Alderoty further concluded, the current SEC boss has already presumed the cryptocurrency industry guilty and has continued to file lawsuits against other crypto businesses “without investigation,” as in the subsequent case of the crypto trading platform Binance.
SEC’s ‘meetings with a felon’
On the other hand, the lawyer previously criticized the agency for “becoming irrelevant on the international stage” and observed its failure to share information “about meetings with a felon,” meaning the former CEO of the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried.
At the same time, Alderoty also compared Gensler to the fictional movie villain Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, from a 1989 stage play and portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1992 cult classic ‘A Few Good Men,’ a character that became a symbol of institutional indoctrination, as Finbold reported on November 16.
Elsewhere, XRP, the token that was at the center of the court battle between Ripple and the SEC, was at press time trading at $0.6253, up 2.24% in the last 24 hours, down 4.71% across the previous seven days and advancing 20.97% over the month, as per data on November 20.
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