HSBC, Credit Suisse and others fined for forex rigging

EU antitrust regulators on Thursday fined Barclays, Credit Suisse, HSBC and NatWest €344m for rigging the foreign exchange spot trading market.

UBS avoided a €94m fine as it had alerted the European Commission about the cartel, which was set up via a chat room known as “Sterling Lads”.

The EU competition regulator said the cartel had focused on forex spot trading of G10 currencies. HSBC’s fine was the largest at €174.3m, followed by Credit Suisse at €83.3m, Barclays at €54.3m and RBS at €32.5m.

Barclays, HSBC and RBS admitted wrongdoing in return for a cut in the penalty. RBS is now known as NatWest after a rebranding last year.

Barclays, Credit Suisse and HSBC declined to comment. NatWest said the misconduct took place in a single chat room and involved a former employee about a decade ago and its culture and controls have changed during the past 10 years.

UBS said: “This is a legacy matter where UBS was the first bank to disclose potential misconduct and we are pleased the matter is resolved.”

The EU competition enforcer said the forex rigging was done via the chat room. A previous cartel sanctioned in 2019 and involving some of the same banks featured chat rooms called Semi Grumpy Old Men, Three Way Banana Split, Two and a Half Men and Only Marge.

The traders involved exchanged sensitive information and trading plans and occasionally co-ordinated their trading strategies via the chat room on whether and when to sell or buy the currencies in their portfolios, the commission said.

The fines are the latest to hit banks, which have received billions of euros in penalties worldwide over more than a decade, including for the rigging of benchmarks used in many day-to-day financial transactions.

“Today, we complete our sixth cartel investigation in the financial sector since 2013 and conclude the third leg of our investigation into the foreign exchange spot trading market,” EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and RBS were fined a combined €1.07bn in May 2019 by the EU antitrust authorities for manipulating the foreign exchange market via two cartels, in 2007-2013 for one group and 2009-2012 for the other.