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- Senators Make "Inappropriate" Effort to Question Sullivan & Cromwell as FTX Lead Bankruptcy Counsel
Senators Make "Inappropriate" Effort to Question Sullivan & Cromwell as FTX Lead Bankruptcy Counsel
Plus Tether gets booted from Crypto.com in Canada.
Good morning from D.C., where I somehow narrowly beat the grounding of every U.S. flight to send out a jet lag edition of this newsletter! Here's what's up.
Clips ✂️
FTX Bankruptcy Law Firm Is Wrong Fit for Role, Senators Say
FTX lead bankruptcy counsel Sullivan & Cromwell is wrong for its role because the firm’s prior work for the crypto exchange raises impartiality concerns, four US senators said.
“The firm is simply not in a position to uncover the information needed to ensure confidence in any investigation or findings,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Col.) and three colleagues wrote.
They questioned whether Sullivan & Cromwell could effectively investigate current and former partners who were central in FTX’s conduct. “Given their longstanding legal work for FTX, they may well bear a measure of responsibility for the damage wrecked on the company’s victims,” the senators said.
👉 A copy of the letter signed by Sen. Hickenlooper, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.)) is here.
The judge stated that the letter was an “inappropriate ex parte communication" that would have no influence on his decision.
A letter from four U.S. senators calling for an independent examiner in the FTX bankruptcy is an “inappropriate” intervention that won’t sway his decisions, Judge John Dorsey told a court hearing Wednesday.
By @jackschickler— CoinDesk (@CoinDesk)
2:33 PM • Jan 11, 2023
Crypto.com Delists Tether’s USDT Stablecoin for Canadian Users
Crypto.com, one of the world’s top exchanges by volume, will delist Tether’s dollar-linked stablecoin, USDT, from its trading platform for users in Canada, according to an email sent by the firm to customers.
The company made the decision “in accordance with instructions from the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) as part of our pre-registration undertaking for a restricted dealer license,” a spokesperson for the exchange said in the email.
SPAC-Squared Is Wall Street’s Latest Wheeze
Just when you think you’ve seen it all in SPAC-land, along comes a money-losing company that only recently went public via a blank-check firm announcing a merger with a second special-purpose acquisition company to save its skin. SPAC-squared, if you like.
Wejo Group Ltd., a British connected-vehicle data company, became a public company in November 2021 after combining with Virtuoso Acquisition Corp., a SPAC. On Tuesday, Wejo said it plans to merge with another blank-check firm, TKB Critical Technologies I, to secure up to $100 million in cash.
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It’s also the first time I’ve seen a company that’s already completed one SPAC merger promptly turn around and do another. Former SPACs are called De-SPACs, so I guess we could also dub this a Re-SPAC….
Crypto’s Hotel California Traps the Winklevoss TwinsYou can get into crypto any time you like, but can you ever leave? A fierce $900 million Bitcoin feud between the billionaire Winklevoss twins and Barry Silbert suggests the virtual currency bubble’s main legacy is a version of Hotel California, with clients desperately hoping for fresh money to pick up the tab — or a change in management that will let them check out.
At the heart of the dispute is a crypto lending business that blew up in spectacular fashion last year after bringing Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Silbert together. As relatively early Bitcoin adopters, the moguls no doubt recognized one big challenge in crypto: How to earn money from a pile of virtual tokens with no intrinsic value.
What’s the Legal Definition of Greenwashing? Green Insight
For example, a company says it’s reducing its carbon footprint—but fails to say that the calculation excludes massive emissions produced by its customers or suppliers. Or an asset manager overhypes the environmental, social and governance standards it uses to allocate clients’ money. But know-it-when-you-see-it doesn’t translate well into statutory authority.
“The battle to stamp out greenwashing continues to be foiled by the lack of a clear and common definition across jurisdictions,” said Maia Godemer, a London-based sustainable finance analyst at BloombergNEF. “The market can only continue to flourish if regulators build a common framework around what is considered environmentally or socially sustainable.”
Mark Cuban will be deposed in court next month for things like this 👇🏼👇🏼
— Milk Road (@MilkRoadDaily)
7:25 PM • Jan 10, 2023
Coinbase to cut 20% jobs and abandon 'several projects' by @refsrc
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch)
12:01 PM • Jan 10, 2023