In the new legal battles between American billionaire Elon Musk and the US Securities Commission following he accused it of targeting him, the CEO of Tesla asked a federal judge to terminate his 2018 agreement with the institution, which requires that some of his tweets be examined by a lawyer, before they are published.
Musk also asked the judge to block a subpoena from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to request pre-approval records regarding a possible sale of some of his shares.
His lawyers wrote to US District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan, that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s prosecution of their client, Musk, amounted to harassment, and revealed great bad intentions.
They also considered that the 2018 approval decree resolving securities fraud charges at the SEC should not allow for “unlimited, mobile investigations” of government critics and impede their constitutional right to freedom of expression, Archyde.com reported.
Mutual accusations and targeting
It is noteworthy that the American billionaire accused the authority late last year of targeting him.
His lawyers and electric car company Tesla, which he mostly owns and chairs, told a court that the US Securities and Exchange Commission was targeting Musk and Tesla.
The regulator, the largest US securities regulator, did not pay Tesla shareholders the $40 million it received in the settlement of a lawsuit once morest Musk over his tweets in 2018.
The federal judge, who is looking into the case, raised questions regarding the position of the previous settlement’s value of $40 million through the accounting data he requested last December.
This led to a call for investigation that reached the authority regarding the tweet that the founder and president of the company, Elon Musk, made in 2018 regarding his intention to delist the company’s shares from the stock exchange.
Private company?!
The SEC issued a subpoena on November 16, requesting information regarding Tesla’s governance operations and compliance with the terms of the settlement that the two sides reached in September 2018, Tesla said in a statement to the exchange.
It is noteworthy that Tesla had agreed, as part of that settlement, to set controls to monitor Musk’s data, including his tweets, following the Securities Commission accused him of manipulating the company’s shares, when he said that he had collected the necessary funds to purchase the company’s shares offered for trading in the stock exchange in order to Convert it to a private company.
