U.S. Magistrate Judge has ordered Ripple to produce one million missing Slack messages between employees which the Securities and Exchange Commission has sought to access to.
Despite Ripple’s protestations that complying would cost up to $1 million, the judge believed the messages are critical and unique evidence for the SEC’s ongoing case against the multi-billion dollar company for selling unregistered securities. The SEC filed suit against Ripple Labs and its initial and current CEOs for selling XRP as an unregistered security in December 20.
The original motion to compel Ripple from August 9, the SEC argued that the messages between Ripple employees were “relevant to the parties’ claims and defenses and proportional to the needs of the case.” It also said that Ripple should deliver all messages from 22 email custodians in addition to the Slack messages:
Last month, the SEC told Judge Netburn that the Slack messages which Ripple produced appeared to be incomplete. Ripple initially denied this claim, but revised its statement by claiming it was a data processing mistake which resulted in the company only producing a small amount of the relevant messages, and that more than one million messages were missing.
