The case of the New York Attorney General (NYAG) against Bitfinex and Tether has already cost the exchange half a million dollars.
This is what was revealed by the lawyers of iFinex, the company that manages Bitfinex and Tether, in a letter filed yesterday at the Supreme Court in New York.
In this letter, lawyers Jason Weinstein and Charles Michael of Steptoe & Johnson and David Miller and Zoe Phillips of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, asked Judge Cohen not to oblige their clients to produce all the documents required by the NYAG, since the costs are very high.
In the letter, the lawyers write that until now their clients have already spent over $500,000 to answer questions from the NYAG, as companies and their staff use more than 10 different communication platforms, many of them encrypted, making data collection and review a complex and costly task.
According to the lawyers, this was one of the largest and most complex document collection and review efforts in which they had ever participated and involved more than 60 lawyers.
For the time being, the court has postponed its decision on both iFinex’s request to close the proceedings and on the deadline within which the company should submit all the requested documentation.
Hence this letter from iFinex’s lawyers is probably an attempt to avoid a situation where their client is forced to spend unnecessarily high costs if the judge eventually decides to close the case.
This is because, should the judge decide in favour of the NYAG office, Bitfinex and Tether will immediately appeal for more time.
In their letter, iFinex’s lawyers also argued that Tether’s credit line to Bitfinex, which is at the heart of the case, had in fact already been paid: Bitfinex would have returned USD 100 million to Tether by bank transfer.
