On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission responded to claims by submitting a response letter to a Federal Judge. TeslaElon Musk stated that Elon Musk was the CEO and claimed that the agency had made “broken promises” as well as engaged in “a pattern of conduct”. amounting to harassmentFollowing an earlier settlement agreement.

The SEC was established in September 2018. charged Musk with making “false and misleading” statements to investors after he announced via Twitter that he had secured funding for a private buyout of Tesla at $420 a share. After his tweets, Tesla stock plunged into unusual volatility. The deal Musk referred to did not materialize.

Tesla, Musk, and the SEC reached a new settlement in 2019, to settle the charges.

Musk also had to relinquish his position as Tesla’s chairman, and was subject to a $20 million penalty. Tesla was also fined $20 million. Musk and Tesla reached an agreement that Tesla’s celebrity-CEO will have his posts on social media reviewed by securities experts before publication of material business information.

After they had paid $40 million, the money was to be divided among Tesla shareholders.

Attorney Alex Spiro, who represented Musk and Tesla in a Thursday letter to the court, suggested that the SEC was not fulfilling their obligation to pay $40 million to Tesla shareholders.

Stephen Buchholz, the SEC’s Stephen Buchholz, replied to Friday that progress was being made on this task which is quite complex. Tesla has never raised concerns about the matter to the SEC before, and the SEC staff anticipates that they will submit a plan of distribution to the court by March 2022.

Spiro Musk, Musk’s attorney suggested that SEC was not focusing on remittances as it was too involved in investigating Tesla. Spiro wrote that the SEC seemed to target Musk and Tesla because Musk is still a vocal critic of the government.

Musk’s disputes with regulators can be messy, public and even include vulgar remarks. Multiple times, Musk has voiced his dissatisfaction with the SEC via Twitter. October 2018 when he called the agency the “shortseller enrichment commission,” and in July 2020 when he wrote: “SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon’s.”

Spiro suggested, too that Musk’s First Amendment rights were being “chilled” by the SEC’s continuing investigative activities.

A recent financial filing was made for the fourth-quarter of 2021, Tesla revealed that it had received a subpoena from the SEC late last year. According to the filings, “On November 16th, 2021, The SEC issued an order to obtain information from us regarding our governance process around compliance with this settlement as amended.”

The SEC sent a Friday letter to court complaining that Tesla wasn’t following the proper procedure to contest any subpoenas the agency issued in its capacity as independent regulator.