PANews reported on January 2 that Ryan VanGrack, Coinbase's vice president of legal affairs, pointed out that more than 50% of the record-breaking fines for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in one year came from a single case (the Terraform case, amounting to $4.4 billion), but this fine is likely to be unrecoverable. He further criticized that focusing on law enforcement statistics could lead to wrong incentives and misleading. In contrast, more attention should be paid to the amount of money returned to damaged investors, and the historical record in this area was set in 2019 (US$1.2 billion).
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) faces huge challenges in terms of uncollected fines, which have reached a total of $10 billion so far. The report pointed out that although the SEC has increased the amount of fines in recent years due to political pressure, the actual amount of money recovered is far less than the amount shown in the case. One typical case is former corporate raider Paul Bilzerian. He was sentenced to pay $62 million for securities fraud, but the SEC has never been able to successfully recover this fine for 31 years. During this period, Bilzerian filed for bankruptcy twice and moved to St. Kitts and Nevis to avoid payment. This fine, plus interest, has now grown to $180 million. The article also mentioned that this problem of uncollected fines highlights the limitations of the SEC in enforcement and fund recovery, and also raises questions about its law enforcement effectiveness.
