Schansman v. Sberbank of Russia PJSC

Background

The court considered defendant VTB Bank (PJSC)’s motion to seal or maintain redactions in documents filed in connection with the plaintiffs’ motion to compel. VTB sought protection for three categories of information: account holders’ names and account numbers; the names of VTB employees, its consultant, and its consulting company; and correspondence between VTB and regulators.

The court treated the filings as “judicial documents,” meaning documents filed with the court to which the public generally has a presumptive right of access. It applied the balancing framework governing requests to seal or redact such documents, including the court’s consideration of whether narrower redactions could protect privacy without unnecessarily limiting public access.

Rulings on the Requested Redactions

For account holders’ names and account numbers, the court allowed redaction of the names and account numbers of nonparties who had not already been identified in the Second Amended Complaint. It did not allow redaction of individuals whose names had already been publicly disclosed in that complaint. The court found that those individuals’ privacy interests were minimal and that the public interest in understanding the motion-to-compel briefing outweighed those interests.

For VTB employees and litigation-related consultants, the court allowed redaction of the names of any VTB employees appearing in the filings who did not fall within the categories specifically identified by the court. It did not allow redaction of the name of the consultant hired to respond to the plaintiffs’ document requests, the company assisting VTB with document review, or VTB’s Russian attorneys. The court found that parties who chose to represent VTB or work with it on this litigation had only a very limited privacy interest in those names.

For the regulatory correspondence, the court rejected VTB’s reliance on the bank examination privilege. The court stated that the privilege belongs to banking regulators and cannot be asserted by third parties for the regulators. It also found that the correspondence concerned the approval process for litigation documents, not bank supervision. In addition, the court determined that keeping the correspondence confidential would improperly obscure the regulators’ role in stopping production of documents that VTB claimed it was required to produce in the United States. The court therefore required that materials consisting of or relating to the regulatory correspondence remain unsealed and unredacted.

Disposition

The court granted in part and denied in part VTB’s motion to seal, Docket #620. It directed the defendants to refile by February 21, 2025, all memoranda, declarations, and other documents connected to the motion to compel that contained redactions inconsistent with the ruling. Each refiled document had to include the original docket number in its name.