In a clarified lawsuit against Tron founder Justin Sun, the SEC said that his frequent visits to the United States gave him the right to legal prosecution.
In March 2023, the regulator accused the entrepreneur and three related companies of unregistered securities offering in the form of Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens.
The agency also believes that the defendants manipulated the TRX secondary market through "money laundering".
In the filed motion to dismiss the lawsuit, representatives of the San noted that the SEC "is not a global regulator." Its efforts to apply U.S. securities laws "to the conduct of predominantly foreign individuals" go "too far," they stressed. The founder of Tron, being a native of China, also holds a Grenada passport.
In an updated complaint, the Commission indicated that according to its data, between 2017 and 2019, Sun spent more than 380 days in the United States.
His business trips included major cities such as New York, Boston, Massachusetts and San Francisco. According to the SEC, an entrepreneur with controlled companies "purposefully took actions in the United States against them."
The initial lawsuit regarding allegations of fictitious trading of TRX featured an unnamed platform. This time, the Commission clarified that we are talking about the liquidated Bittrex exchange.
According to the SEC, Sun personally communicated with the platform's team on the issue of listing TRX in 2018. Many documents related to the companies attributed to him were signed by the entrepreneur personally.
The department considered that the fact that Bittrex is based in the United States also confirms the right of jurisdiction over the defendants.
Recall that the American exchange and its head settled the SEC's claims in August 2023, agreeing to pay $ 24 million. Prior to this, Bittrex unsuccessfully tried to challenge the authority of the department in regulating cryptocurrencies.