SEC wants Ripple to deliver Slack messages left by its employees in order to obtain critical evidence
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) attorney Jorge Tenreiro has filed an urgent petition for a court order to force Ripple employees to turn over their Slack communications. This information was also shared by a lawyer who closely follows the lawsuit between Ripple and the SEC, James K. Filan, on Twitter.
#XRPCommunity #SECGov v. #Ripple #XRP BREAKING: SEC files emergency motion for a discovery conference regarding Slack communications. Seeks order compelling Ripple to search and produce relevant communications between Ripple employees on Slack.https://t.co/AQ8Av1igoV
— James K. Filan ???? (@FilanLaw) August 9, 2021
SEC wants Ripple employees’ Slack messages
According to the SEC, there are more than 1 million messages that must be searched. Since Ripple employees communicated with Slack frequently by email, they generated terabytes of data. The SEC stated that the defendants agreed to search all messages at the beginning of the discovery phase.
However, its production ended up being limited to only 1,468 messages that contained some critically important information. The San Francisco-based company is now refusing to provide access to the rest of the chats after blaming a data-processing mistake on its initial reluctance to cooperate.
The SEC states that the Slack messages it managed to obtain contain some critical and unique evidence. In particular, the conversations the regulator has seen relate to Ripple’s desire to generate speculative XRP trading, the company’s concerns about XRP price, the impact of XRP sales on operations. Ripple’s business, as well as the legal status of the cryptocurrency.
Filan further announced that parties tee up a deliberative process privilege dispute concerning documents withheld by the SEC based on the SEC’s assertion of the privilege; file a joint request for 8-page letters addressing the issue.
Source: James K. Filan/Twitter
Not long after, Ripple files a request for an extension of time until Monday, August 16, 2021, to respond to the SEC’s emergency motion regarding the Slack communications discovery dispute.
Source: James K. Filan/Twitter
SEC relied on the information is obtained from Slack to refresh the witnesses’ recollections after they would refuse to answer a slew of questions during testimonies:
“Had Ripple properly searched and produced all responsive Slack messages, the SEC would have almost certainly been able to refresh the recollection of other deponents.”
The SEC argues that it has to extend the number of depositions because of evidence developed throughout the discovery and the sheer scale of Ripple’s unlawful XRP offering.
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