A U.S. district court judge has sentenced two former Rabobank bankers to time in prison for their involvement in rigging the London interbank offered rate. Anthony Allen received a two-year prison term and Anthony Conti was sentenced to a year and a day.
Conti and Allen were convicted by a jury in last year. Prosecutors accused them of conspiring to turn in fake rates for calculating Libor, which is based on submissions from over a dozen banks. They believed the two bankers sought to help other Rabobank traders make more money on trades. Meantime, their defense lawyers contended that the men’s submission to Libor were made in good faith.
Allen was the worldwide head of liquidity and finance at Rabobank and the supervisor of Conti, who was a senior money markets trader who made submissions to Libor daily. Libor plays a key role in determining the borrowing costs for trillions of dollars in loans.
The U.S. Justice Department has criminally charged 11 other individuals in its probe into Libor rigging. Four of them, three of them who were traders at Rabobank, have entered guilty pleas.
Some of the world’s biggest banks have had to pay huge fines because their traders colluded with each other to rig Libor. Billions of dollars in fines have been imposed against firms such as Deutsche Bank (DB), UBS (UBS), Barclays (BARC), ICAP, Rabobank, JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Citigroup (C), RP Martin, Lloyds Bank, and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).
In other Libor news, former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes must forfeit about $1.2M in compensation and bonuses because he was convicted for rigging Libor. Hayes is serving an 11-year prison term for his U.K. conviction. The Serious Fraud Office said Hayes was the leader who spurred over a dozen traders into manipulating Libor.
Two Former Rabobank Traders Sentenced to Prison for Manipulating U.S. Dollar and Japanese Yen LIBOR Interest Rates, DOJ, March 10, 2016
Ex-Trader Tom Hayes Ordered to Pay $1.2 Million in Libor Case, NY Times, March 23, 2016