The long running legal tussle between the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple saw another round of court filings. The commission has filed its response to Ripple’s Motion to seal certain documents. The defendant had filed to seal in a reply to the regulator’s motion for judgment and remedies.
SEC filing new motion
As per the filings, the SEC addressed Judge Analisa Torres arguing that the the information Ripple seeks to conceal should be public. However, it mentioned that the financial and securities sales data Ripple wants to seal are “judicial documents”. This is one of the main reasons that it should be accessible to the public.
“The SEC does not challenge the sealing of Ripple’s recent financial statements as a whole. But where financial figures or specific terms of contracts have been used by the parties to calculate and justify remedy requests, that information should be made public.”, the commission argued in the court.
It mentioned that Ripple had repeatedly pointed to the SEC’s earlier sealing and redaction positions and this Court’s decisions in earlier stages of this litigation to justify its requests here. Meanwhile, Ripple had failed to see three key differences.
What are the main reasons?
The SEC stated that the first reason is the Court’s prior holdings ruled as to redactions in the context of specific filings, not for the rest of the case. Information not central to the Court’s liability decision on summary judgment, including the financial information and offering terms Ripple seeks to seal, is now at the crux of the remedies decision.
The second reason is Ripple has now been adjudicated to have sold investment contracts without registering these sales or making the disclosures required to do so. Yet Ripple persists in trying to conceal the very information that it legally would have had to disclose to sell those securities.
In the end, the third reason is more years have elapsed since the Court made those prior rulings on sealing and redacting, rendering even more stale much of the business information Ripple still wants to conceal.
Ripple’s native crypto recorded an uptick amid the crucial case filings. XRP price jumped by more than 6% in the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, it is still down by around 12% on the year to date (YTD) basis. XRP is trading at an average price of $0.543, at the press time. It is still down by 85% from its all time high (ATH) of $3.84 recorded on January 4, 2018.
