Judge Sarah Netburn has released a scheduling order revealing the timeline for Ripple’s motion to strike out new expert materials from the SEC’s motion.
Netburn was recently nominated by the Biden administration as a district judge for the Southern District of New York, a move that the XRP community says will give it a significant advantage in the legal battle.
The US District Court for the Southern District of New York has published a scheduling timeline for the Ripple vs. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) case regarding the blockchain company’s motion to strike new expert materials from the regulator.
As Crypto News Flash reported, Ripple has sought to strike new expert materials presented by the SEC expert witness Andrea Fox. Fox supported the SEC’s remedies calculations and proposals. However, the regulator waited until the last minute to submit Fox’s proposals in what Ripple described as “precisely the type of sandbagging” the law seeks to prevent.
Ripple argues that the court must strike Fox as an expert witness, stating:
The company’s motion then lists four reasons the court must strike, which includes the SEC’s failure to explain why it didn’t comply with the deadline. The company further argues that “a party’s late filing of an expert report that is critical to a party’s case only serves to underscore the inexcusable quality of its delayed submission.”
With Fox’s expert witness account presented so late, Ripple would have to reopen proceedings to depose her on some of the proposals she makes. This would cause great expense to the company and delays to the process. As dozens of other cases have shown, the company would also suffer from prejudice.
RIpple’s motion stated:
…the SEC failed to disclose the Fox Declaration not only until after the expert disclosure deadline, but after the remedies discovery deadline that gave it another chance to do so. Other cases in this District have excluded similar untimely disclosures. The Court should strike the Fox Declaration and all references to it in the SEC’s Remedies Motion.
Judge Netburn gave the SEC until tomorrow, April 29, to file its response to Ripple’s motion. After this, the California company will have three business days to respond to the watchdog.
At the heart of the latest fight between the two is how much the blockchain firm should fork out. The SEC is going big and has proposed a $2 billion penalty, one of the highest in the history of crypto, only bettered by Celsius’ $4.7 billion penalty and Binance’s $4.3 billion fine.
However, Ripple is pushing for a more lenient fine of just $10 million.
XRP currently trades at $0.5225, gaining 1.3% in the past day.
