Five banks fined over a billion euros by EU
EU antitrust regulators on Thursday fined Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and Royal Bank of Scotland a total of 1.07 billion euros for rigging the spot foreign exchange market for 11 currencies.
Swiss peer UBS was not fined as it alerted the two cartels to the European Commission. The financial industry has been hit with billion euro fines worldwide in the last decade for rigging key benchmarks.
The banks were accused of participating in cartels to manipulate the foreign exchange market for 11 currencies.
EU officials found that two separate cartels used chat rooms to share information about customers’ orders, prices and other trading activities in order to manipulate in the spot markets between 2007 to 2013 for the euro, pound, yen, Swiss franc, US, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian dollars, and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian crowns.
