McHenry, Huizenga Call Out Chair Gensler’s “Unacceptable” Failure to Provide Information on Charges Against Sam Bankman-Fried
The Financial Services Committee will consider all avenues to compel documents that Chair Gensler has so far refused to provide
Washington,
April 13, 2023 -
The Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Patrick McHenry (NC-10), along with the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Bill Huizenga (MI-04), sent a letter to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler demanding that the SEC provide a staff recommendation memo and other information related to charges filed by the agency against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
In the letter, the lawmakers state that compulsory measures could be taken to obtain the requested documents should the agency fail to fulfill their request. This follows a previous attempt to obtain information from the SEC, which Chair Gensler has so far failed to turn over.
Read the full letter here.
Read key excerpts from the letter below:
“Thank you for your April 11 letter related to your efforts to comply with our document request. Unfortunately, your commitment in the letter to ‘continue [the] ongoing review of Commission records and supplement the production of responsive materials and information, as appropriate’ is insufficient. On February 10, 2023, we sent you a letter requesting documents related to charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Sam Bankman-Fried. Ignoring the deadline, the SEC actively impeded Committee staff from discussing the request with anyone in the Office of the General Counsel until Chairman Huizenga formally requested a conversation with the SEC General Counsel. The subsequent staff level conversations have yet to yield any of the requested documents.
“On March 15, 2023, your staff provided a staff-level briefing on the SEC enforcement process. While the briefing provided interesting information related to parallel investigations. It was not responsive to anything requested in the letter. Moreover, the 232 pages of documents provided by your staff after the briefing are publicly available and not responsive to the request.
“Your staff subsequently requested that we narrow the scope of the requested information in order to start a rolling production. Committee staff obliged and produced a narrowed list of custodians, a narrowed time frame, and a list of easily identifiable documents, such as the staff recommendation memo presented to the Commission for a vote on charges. Committee staff followed up more than a week later to check on the progress and were told that it was a ‘time consuming and extensive process,’ without any indication that a production was incoming. This is unacceptable.
We expect the staff recommendation memo to be produced immediately and all other material gathered as a result of the narrowed scope to be produced no later than 5:00 p.m. on April 17, 2023. Failure to produce the requested information could result in the Committee considering using compulsory process, if necessary, to obtain the requested information.”
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