More than a dozen regulators from Europe, the United States and Asia are carrying out their own investigations or are helping in the accusations that chatting and other forms of electronic communication are being used to share client information and manipulate daily indexes linked to foreign currencies. Begun almost a year ago in the United Kingdom, the investigations on e-Bank manipulations have been extended all over the world, affecting at least 15 banks. Nine of them – Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland, Standard Chartered and UBS – have temporarily laid off 21 operators, action which was added to recently by the BNP and Bank of America.
For many of these banks, this is the second scandal of this type that has affected them in a brief period of time, while the investigations on e-bank manipulations continue with benchmark inter-banks like Libor. Up to today, the Libor case has caused the dismissal of dozens of operators and made it pay some 6 billion dollars in fines by the regulators.
As for e-bank manipulations through chats and other similar means, sources guarantee that they are examining hundreds of millions of messages sent by chat operators, or by text or voice messages, in many banks like Barclays, UBS and RBS, reaching agreements with the Justice Department for no trial or suspended prosecution on the Libor manipulation, obliging them to cooperate with officials and putting them at serious risk if they deduce that crimes have been committed in the United States. The investigators have a hard task with the accusations of e-bank manipulations for sharing client information and manipulating daily indexes linked to foreign currencies, keeping in mind that four groups – Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS – manage more than half of the market, the result of which is an opaque market that gives traders a clear advantage over their clients while they refer to their information.