Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland Settle & Others for More than $2.3B with European Union Over Interbank Offered Rates

Deutsche Bank (DB) has announced that as part of a collective settlement, it will pay $992,329,000 to settle investigations involving interbank offered rates, including probes into the trading of Euro interest rate derivatives and interest rate derivatives for the Yen.
Also paying fines as part of the collective settlement are Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) which will pay $535,173,000 and Society General SA (SLE), which will pay $610,454,000, and three others. In total, the financial firms will pay a record $2.3 billion.

The fines are for manipulating the Euribor and the Yen London interbank offered rate. EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said that regulators would continue to look into other cases linked to currency trading and Libor. Also related to these probes, Citigroup (C) has been fined $95,811,100, while JPMorgan (JPM) is paying $108M. Because of Citigroup’s cooperation into this matter, it avoided paying an additional $74.6 million. The two firms reportedly admitted that they were part of the Yen Libor financial derivatives cartel.

Almunia said that transcripts of Internet conversations exist documenting collusion between traders. According to Bloomberg News, which obtained excerpts of charts that the EU used in its investigation, one trader usually requested that a few banks set low or high fixings for a benchmark rate. (This month, Deutsche Bank barred multi-party chat rooms at its currency trading and fixed-income outfits.)

The setting of Yen Libor and European Libor were part of attempts by financial firms to make money in the financial derivatives connected to the benchmarks. Because UBS (UBS) and Barclays (BARC) notified the authorities about these activities first, they were not fined in the cartel matter, although regulators had fined them previously over Libor manipulation.

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Deutsche Bank to RBS Fined by EU for Rate Rigging, Bloomberg, December 4, 2013

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