The United States Securities and Exchange Commissionthe SEC, has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk to force him to testify in an investigation related to the purchase of Twitter, and public communications related to the purchase agreement that he made at the time, according to the data in the possession of the court in the case.
This lawsuit, filed this Thursday before a federal court in San Francisco, wants a judge to issue an order forcing Musk to testify, alleging a “blatant refusal to comply» with a previous SEC subpoena, since according to Bloomberg Musk did not appear a few weeks ago to testify when asked.
This measure taken by the SEC is the last step in the investigation that the commission has opened to clarify whether Musk complied with his obligations regarding the disclosure of information when he began purchasing large amounts of Twitter shares, before his agreement of purchase of the company. And it reveals the years that both parties have had a relationship plagued by clashes over their public comments on various topics. Among them, matters related to their companies.
Musk began purchasing large amounts of Twitter shares in early 2022, as he acknowledged on April 4 of that same year. He then claimed to have become the company’s largest shareholder. At the end of April, Musk signed a purchase agreement for the company for $44 billion, and after a legal battle of several months to try to back out and not buy it, he formalized the purchase in October of the year. past.
Since then, Twitter’s current owner has faced several legal problems related to the operation. In fact, he has already testified twice as part of the SEC investigation, which he did in July 2022. That same month, Musk claims that he sent several documents to federal investigators working on the investigation. According to an SEC lawyer, several were documents in his own handwriting.
Last May, the SEC sent a subpoena to Musk to testify again on the issue, according to the documentation in the possession of the court before which he has now been sued. In this specific case, with it they want to find evidence and answers from Musk that the SEC does not yet have.
In principle, Musk agreed to testify on September 15, a date that was later changed. But two days before he was scheduled to testify, Musk curtly notified the SEC that he was not going to testify. The entity then tried to negotiate with Musk to find alternative dates for his testimony throughout the fall, apparently without success.
According to the documentation filed with the SEC «The subpoena to which Musk has not responded is related to an ongoing, non-public SEC investigation regarding whether, among other things, Musk violated various provisions of the federal securities laws in connection with, on the one hand, his 2022 purchases of Twitter Inc shares, and on the other, its 2022 statements and communications to the SEC related to Twitter«.
When Musk informed the SEC that he was not going to testify, his lawyer, Alex Spiro, wrote to them on September 13, pointing out that Musk had already testified twice on the same issue, and that was enough.
Spiro’s letter, included among the information presented in filing the lawsuit, accused regulators of seeking Musk’s testimony in bad faith and trying to waste his time. Additionally, Spiro noted that the recent publication of Walter Isaacson’s Musk biography would interfere with the process, because it contained “potentially relevant new information on this matter” that would take time for both sides to study.
