Chase, Citi & Barclays Among Banks Fined $1.2 Billion Over Forex Rigging
Barclays, Citi and Chase alongside MUFG and Royal Bank of Scotland have been fined a total of 1.07 billion euros ($1.2 billion) by EU antitrust regulators for rigging the spot foreign exchange market for 11 currencies. Swiss bank UBS were spared a fine of 285 million euros since it alerted authorities of the forex rigging.
The affected currencies are the Euro, British Pound, Japanese Yen, Swiss Franc, US, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian Dollars, and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian crowns.
The first decision (so-called “Forex – Three Way Banana Split” cartel) imposes a total fine of €811 197 000 on Barclays, The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Citigroup and JPMorgan.
The second decision (so-called “Forex- Essex Express” cartel) imposes a total fine of €257 682 000 on Barclays, RBS and MUFG Bank (formerly Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi).
UBS is an addressee of both decisions. But was not fined as it revealed the existence of the cartels to the Commission.
The EU investigation had been going on for the past six years. It revealed that some individual traders from various banks in charge of forex trading, a form of trading executed on an intra-day basis, exchanged sensitive information and trading plans through various online professional chat rooms.
These exchanges of information, “enabled them to make informed market decisions on whether to sell or buy the currencies they had in their portfolios and when,” the Commission said in its report.
The report further stated that most of the traders knew each other on personal basis. They logged into multilateral chatrooms on Bloomberg terminals for the whole day, engaging in extensive conversations about a variety of subject, including updates on their trading activities.
You can read the full press release here.
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Looks like Chase Citi and Barclay took their lead from AMEX and formed their own “rat” teams. Since various banks have been caught racketeering before (not just with FOREX, but with LIBOR rates, etc.) can’t the Feds confiscate all their assets under the RICO law? Surely there must be “predicate” offenses, perhaps in the form of mail and wire fraud, and there seems to be a pattern of criminal activity.