HSBC Holdings, Credit Suisse Group, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland Group were fined 344 million euros ($390 million) by the European Commission for their involvement in a foreign-exchange price fixing cartel.
“The collusive behavior of the five banks undermined the integrity of the financial sector at the expense of the European economy and consumers,” Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
Traders ran the cartels from online chatrooms, swapping sensitive information and trading plans that allowed them to make informed decisions to buy or sell currencies, the regulator said. In this case, the traders occasionally used a chatroom dubbed “Sterling Lads” to plot their buying and selling. While still in the hundreds of millions, these cartel fines are lower than a 1.3 billion-euro penalty for banks for rigging Euribor rates and below a record 3.8 billion-euro penalty for collusion between truckmakers.
UBS Group escaped a 94 million-euro fine under the Commission’s leniency provisions for having revealed the existence of the cartel.
“We are pleased to have reached this settlement regarding serious misconduct that took place in a single chatroom, and that involved a former employee of the bank, around a decade ago,” a spokesman for NatWest, RBS’s new name, said. “Our culture and controls have changed fundamentally during the past 10 years and this kind of behavior has no place at the bank we are today.”
The Swiss lender Credit Suisse didn’t get a cut in its penalty. The bank
HSBC was fined 174 million euros, Barclays 54 million euros, RBS 32 million euros and Credit Suisse 83 million euros.
