Ripple has fired back against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) request for it to pay nearly $2 billion in penalties.
In March, the SEC asked the court to order Ripple to pay $876,308,712 in disgorgement, $198,150,940 in prejudgment interest, and a $876,308,712 civil penalty, which totals around $1.95 billion.
Ripple filed an opposition to the SEC’s motion on Monday, according to documents shared by James K. Filan, a defense lawyer and crypto legal expert.
The San Francisco-based payments company argues that the court should deny the SEC’s requests for an injunction, disgorgement, and pre-judgment interest. The firm also suggests the civil penalty should be no more than $10 million.
Ripple’s lawyers argue that $10 million would reflect an appropriate percentage of the company’s actual gross revenues from pre-complaint institutional sales and “would be proportionate in both percentage and dollar amount to comparable digital-asset cases where there was no culpable mental state and no substantial harm or risk of harm to others.”
The SEC first sued the payments firm in late 2020 for allegedly selling XRP as an unregistered security.
Last summer, US District Judge Analisa Torres ruled that Ripple’s automated, open-market sales of XRP, referred to as programmatic sales, did not constitute security offerings, contrary to what the SEC alleged.
The judge did, however, side with the SEC’s claim that Ripple’s sale of XRP directly to institutional buyers constituted a securities offering.
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