The attorneys for Ripple contended that the US Securities and Exchange Commission had more than enough opportunities to acquire more papers prior to the deadline.
Attorneys for Ripple Labs have maintained that the request for further financial papers to be examined by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is unfounded. They maintained that the material is irrelevant to the April trial and that the deadline had past.
The legal team representing Ripple stated in a court filing on January 19 that the SEC had modified its position regarding gathering more data during the discovery phase, which calls for the exchange of pertinent documents between the parties as part of the legal procedure.
The SEC demanded on January 11 that Ripple provide audited financial statements for the fiscal years 2022 and 2023, reveal all agreements pertaining to the transfer or sale of XRP to third parties that were made after the company’s initial filing, and offer more information regarding the proceeds from the institutional sale of XRP.
However, August 2021 marked the end of the window for material requests during the fact-finding stage. According to Ripple, the SEC had “ample opportunity” to request any materials it thought appropriate.
“The SEC never argued that post-complaint discovery was relevant to remedies; rather, it took the position that post-complaint conduct was entirely irrelevant to the case during the discovery dispute between the parties, which has already taken place.”
In the meantime, the legal team for Ripple emphasised that the court should not be persuaded by the way the blockchain payments technology business is portrayed by the US authorities.
The attorneys argued, “The Court should not go down the slippery slope the SEC is paving.”
In addition, Ripple’s attorneys argued that the SEC had exhausted all of its interrogatories, a list of written questions the SEC might ask Ripple to respond to prior to trial.
The filing concludes, “And lastly, with regard to the SEC’s interrogatory in particular, the SEC has used all of its interrogatories in the case and cannot unilaterally grant itself more.”
The SEC and Ripple trial is scheduled to start in April. The commission first brought allegations against Ripple in December 2020, alleging that the business had raised money by selling unregistered securities using XRP.
But in July 2023, a judge decided that the XRP token is not a security in terms of programmatic sales on cryptocurrency exchanges, giving Ripple a partial victory over the SEC.
Stuart Alderoty, the chief legal officer of Ripple, was recently quoted as calling the SEC a “out of control regulator” because of its stance on cryptocurrencies.