Twitter Inc has claimed that paying off a whistleblower did not make it run foul of any terms of its $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk.
The world’s richest man had cited Twitter’s move to pay a whistleblower as a reason to scrap the deal.
Musk lawyers’ said Twitter’s failure to seek his consent before paying $7.75 million to whistleblower Peiter Zatko.
The payment violated the merger agreement and restricts when Twitter could make such payments, the lawyers allege.
Twitter fired Zatko, its security head, in January.
Zatko accused the social media firm of falsely claiming it had a solid security plan and making misleading statements about its defenses against hackers and spam accounts.
The whistleblower will meet the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee on Sept. 13 to discuss the allegations.
Musk, Tesla’s chief, has also accused Twitter of misrepresenting the prevalence of spam or bot accounts on its platform and has sought to terminate the deal citing those reasons.
