Attorneys for Ripple Labs have announced that the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s request to review more financial records is now legitimate because the deadline has already passed and is no longer relevant.
In a court filing, the legal team of Ripple claimed that the SEC has changed its stance on collecting additional information during the discovery phase, which requires each party to share relevant documentation with the other as part of the legal process.
Last week, the SEC demanded that Ripple provide audited financial statements for the fiscal years 2022 and 2024. These statements reveal all agreements for the transfer or sale of XRP to third parties that were made after the company’s original filing and offer more information regarding the proceeds from the institutional sale of XRP.
Ripple counters that the SEC had “ample opportunity” to demand whatever material they deemed necessary, but the fact that the deadline for requesting material during the fact-finding phase has already passed.
The filing reads, “In fact, the parties already have litigated whether post-complaint discovery was proper and in the course of that discovery dispute, the SEC never argued that post-complaint discovery was relevant to remedies but instead took the position that post-complaint conduct was entirely irrelevant to the case.”
In the meantime, the legal team representing Ripple contended that the court ought not to be persuaded by the picture painted by the US regulator against the blockchain technology company.
The lawyers said, “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, or written questions, that the SEC could have asked Ripple to respond to before trial.
It also stated, “And lastly, as to the SEC’s interrogatory in particular, the SEC has used all of its interrogatories in the case and cannot unilaterally grant itself more.”
