The long battle between the American regulatory Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the XRP issuer Ripple has taken a personal turn – literally – with the SEC seeking personal financial information from banks on the company’s two most powerful executives, its co-founder Christian Larsen and CEO Bradley Garlinghouse
Per Bloomberg, Ripple has hit back, asking a federal judge “to block subpoenas sent to six banks” seeking “eight years’ worth” of information, claiming the SEC request amounts to “wholly inappropriate overreach” as the case in question does not involve fraud charges.
The media outlet says that Ripple’s lawyers wrote to the court, in the Southern District of New York, to state,
“The SEC has not offered and cannot provide a coherent explanation for why it is entitled to this information.”
Ripple has dismissed any wrongdoing, with Larsen and Garlinghouse claiming the regulator is demanding to know petty details such as “how much money they spend at the grocery store every week.”
The SEC says Larsen and Garlinghouse personally profited from the sales of the XRP token, which it claims is an “unregistered security,” to the tune of around USD 600m.
And the plot appears to have thickened. Per data picked up by the Twitter-based crypto movement tracker Whale Alert, some XRP 136m (USD 62m) has been on the move in the past day or so, much of it reportedly linked to Ripple execs.
The tracker claims that around XRP 19m has been moved, for instance, from digital money platform Uphold, which decided not to delist XRP, to a Ripple-owned wallet named FundingWallet1 that was activated by Larsen, who then proceeded to send some USD 35m worth of XRP to a number of his other wallets.
Last month, the company’s co-founder and ex-Chief Technical Officer Jed McCaleb also moved millions of USD worth of tokens out of a Tacostand wallet.
At the time of writing (09:51 UTC), XRP trades at USD 0.454 and is up by 2% in a day, trimming its weekly losses to less than 6%.
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Learn more:
– SEC Hits out at Ripple’s ‘Lack of Due Process’ in Letter to Judge
– Ripple Replies to SEC, Claims It Caused Damage to XRP Holders
– Fact-checking Ripple’s Claim that ‘Many G20 Gov’ts’ Call XRP a ‘Currency’
– What SEC Crackdown? Japanese Giant SBI Starts Offering XRP Lending
– XRP Pumpers Hope For More Action; Cardano’s Hoskinson Warns of Pump&Dumps
– XRP Drops Despite Positive Report, A Lawsuit Over USD 50 Loss Emerges
