Two senior executives of Ripple have asked a court to quash requests from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for access to their personal financial records.
In a letter to the Southern District Court in New York on Thursday, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Executive Chairman Chris Larsen asked Judge Sarah Netburn to block subpoenas sent to multiple banks seeking eight years’-worth of their financial information.
The SEC’s request is “wholly inappropriate overreach,” the executives wrote, becaue the case relates to the alleged sale of unregistered securities and is a “non-fraud litigation.”
Specifically, Garlinghouse and Larsen argue their personal financial lives are not relevant, though they have already agreed to provide some financial information. Additionally, the SEC’s demands violate privacy interests, they said.
“The Individual Defendants’ privacy interests are especially powerful here because the requests and subpoenas seek such a comprehensive intrusion into their personal financial lives,” the letter states.
Six banks have been sent subpoenas, including SVB Financial Group, First Republic Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Silver Lake Bank, Silvergate Bank and Citibank N.A, the letter indicates.
“The SEC has not offered and cannot provide a coherent explanation for why it is entitled to this information,” Garlinghouse and Larsen wrote.
In December, the regulator sued Ripple and the co-founders, alleging they had not registered XRP as a security and had sold over $1.3 billion-worth of the cryptocurrency to retail investors.