Tether Requested A Law Firm To Be Booted Out Of A Case, But Why?
- Tether is reportedly demanding to remove law firm Roche Freedman from a class-action lawsuit against the company.
- The move comes after allegations that one of the law firm’s founders, Kyle Roche, abused investor lawsuits to help a corporate client.
The world’s largest stablecoin USDT issuer, Tether, is reportedly demanding to remove law firm Roche Freedman from a class-action lawsuit against the company. The move comes after allegations that one of the law firm’s founders, Kyle Roche, abused investor lawsuits to help a corporate client.
Roche Freedman is a law firm that was established in 2019 by a group of attorneys who had previously worked at Boies Schiller Flexner. The firm is well-known for suing major cryptocurrency issuers and exchanges on behalf of investors.
On Wednesday, Kyle Roche withdrew from all crypto class-actions in New York, including one against Tether for allegedly manipulating the crypto market. Moreover, he went on to pull out all other California cases, including one accusing Binance US of its alleged role in the collapse of Terraform Labs’ stablecoin Terra USD (UST).
The decision was taken in response to video clips allegedly showing Roche confessing to using investor lawsuits to target rivals of Ava Labs, a cryptocurrency company in which he and other partners at the company have financial stakes. The video clips were uploaded by a website called Crypto Leaks.
In a statement, he claimed that the story was incorrect and that the video was taken without permission by a person working for a person he had sued and edited to conceal context.
As a result, Tether is now asking the United States District Judge Katherine Polk Failla to terminate the whole law firm from the case against the company, stating that the co-founder’s backing out alone would not solve the issue.
The letter to the judge makes a valid argument:
“Even if [Kyle Roche] is no longer counsel of record, he would still have access to discovery materials, would retain the ability to direct the conduct of other lawyers at his firm, and would profit from any potential recovery in this lawsuit.”
However, a Reuters report claimed that Tether does not have any problem with Selendy Gay Elsberg and Schneider Wallace Cottrell Konecky, who are representing the investors pursuing the lawsuit.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
