I believe they have not paid MS anything at this point. The...

I believe they have not paid MS anything at this point. The services were for the SDV partner assessment process which did not result in a result yet. That is my recollection of the announcement re termination of the process. More interesting is MS's expectation of services in the next three months that suggests they expect to be needed for a deal (SDV Partnership agreement?) within the next three months.

I am not sure it was Morgan Stanley shorting GXY. I thought it was the silver doughnut involved, UBS and Credit Suisse and some hedge fund out of Boston who were identified as the culprits. I thought MS's great claim to infamy was simply their analyst's prediction of an oversupply of lithium. - which kind of turned out to be correct, but not actually lithium and not actually for the reasons they analysed but by a lucky break for them, bottle necks in the supply chain in China about which they were completely unaware - as were we all, and much earlier than they expected, because they were looking at the end of the chain, rather than the middle, and the end of the chain is actually in a shortage because of those same bottlenecks in the middle stages that no one guessed were there. Oh and the fact that the suppply chain has been further disrupted while those same middle stages shut down to expand capacity with upgraded/new plant.