A New York judge has rejected a joint request from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple Labs for her to approve a proposed settlement agreement that would slash Ripple’s civil penalty to $50 million and dissolve the permanent injunction against the firm.
It is the proposed removal of the permanent injunction, and not the $50 million civil penalty — discounted from the original $125 million imposed by the court last year — that appears to be the sticking point for District Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York (SDNY), who wrote in her Thursday ruling that a permanent injunction against further violations of federal securities laws was, as the SEC suggested at the time, “warranted because of the enormous sums of money Ripple made in violating the law and Ripple’s incentives to continue doing so.”
“Indeed, if the Court should not be concerned about Ripple violating the law, why do the parties want to eliminate the injunction that tells Ripple, ‘Follow the law’?,” Torres wrote. “When the Court imposed the injunction, it did so because it found a ‘reasonable probability’ that Ripple would continue violating federal securities laws. This has not changed, nor do the parties claim that it has.”
The request comes amid sweeping changes at the SEC following the election of U.S. President Donald Trump in January and the subsequent departure of former SEC Chair Gary Gensler. Under the SEC’s new leadership, the regulator has adopted a more crypto-friendly regulatory posture, creating a Crypto Task Force spearheaded by Commissioner Hester Peirce and dropping a host of investigations and litigation against crypto companies. However, as Torres pointed out in her ruling, most of those cases were dismissed by the SEC “before a court found a violation of federal securities laws.”
“Regardless of leadership changes, the SEC has avoided whipsawing between arguments in ongoing litigation in order to protect the agency’s credibility,” said Corey Frayer, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America. “In granting favors to crypto companies, SEC leadership has chosen to tarnish a 90 year reputation the agency carefully built.”
This is the SEC’s second request for an indicative ruling — essentially, a preview of what a lower court will do if a higher court sends the case back down to the lower court for a final decision — that Torres has rejected. In May, she slapped down the first such attempt, citing both jurisdictional and procedural flaws. Earlier this month, the parties tried again, filing a new, expanded request with the court arguing that “exceptional circumstances” warranted the modification of Torres’ final judgement.
Torres was completely unmoved by SEC and Ripple’s arguments, writing: “The Court respects the freedom of parties to amicably resolve their disputes. It is also true that the SEC, like any other law enforcement agency, has discretion to change course after an enforcement action is initiated. But the parties do not have the authority to agree not to be bound by a court’s final judgment that a party violated an Act of Congress in such a manner that a permanent injunction and a civil penalty were necessary to prevent that party from violating the law again. For that, the parties must show exceptional circumstances that outweigh the public interest or the administration of justice. They have not come close to doing so here.”
If the parties “genuinely wish to end this litigation today,” Torres wrote, they have two other choices: they can either withdraw their ongoing appeals in the case, or they can take an appeal.
“Neither option involves requiring this Court to absolve Ripple of its obligations under the law,” Torres said.
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