The U.K. Serious Fraud Office charged 10 former Deutsche Bank AG and Barclays Plc employees with manipulating Euribor, including high-profile trader Christian Bittar, as a global probe into interest-rate benchmark rigging expands.
Six former Deutsche Bank employees and four ex-Barclays employees will be charged with conspiracy to defraud, the SFO said in an e-mailed statement Friday. The nine men and one woman are scheduled to appear at London’s Westminster Magistrates Court on Jan. 11.
Alongside Bittar, ex-Deutsche Bank employees Andreas Hauschild, Joerg Vogt, Ardalan Gharagozlou, Achim Kraemer and Kai-Uwe Kappauf have been charged. Former Barclays employees Colin Bermingham, Carlo Palombo, Philippe Moryoussef and Sisse Bohart also face charges.
The SFO won the first conviction by trial tied to benchmark manipulation in August, when former UBS Group AG trader Tom Hayes was found guilty of rigging the London interbank offered rate and jailed for 14 years. Banks and other financial institutions have paid about $9 billion in fines tied to Libor and other key rates. One other person has pleaded guilty in the Libor probe.
Spokespeople for Barclays and Deutsche Bank declined to comment. Lawyers for Bittar and Hauschild said they will contest the allegations. Lawyers for the other eight either declined to comment or didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Outside U.K.
Other than Bermingham, the defendants all reside outside the U.K., according to an SFO spokeswoman. Bittar and Moryoussef live in Singapore, Bohart in Denmark and Palombo in the U.S. and Italy, while the remaining five are in Germany. All have been notified they face charges. No extradition requests have been made and all appearances will be voluntary at present, the SFO said.
The charges are the first in the SFO’s investigation of Libor manipulation that relate to its euro counterpart -- the Euro interbank offered rate. The agency said more individuals will be prosecuted. The SFO has charged a total of 23 individuals to date.
Barclays was the first firm to be fined over Libor rigging in June 2012, with a 290 million-pound ($442 million) penalty from U.S. and U.K. authorities. The London-based lender’s then-CEO Robert Diamond resigned over the scandal as did Chairman Marcus Agius. Deutsche Bank received a record $2.5 billion fine this year and was forced to fire seven employees to settle U.S. and U.K. investigations. The German lender had already fired a number of other employees over the issue.
source: Bloomberg
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