Page 32 - Barclays Bank (B)

The banks were accused of failings that
meant their traders were able to club

together to rig Foreign Exchange markets as

late as 2013 and as early as 2007.

On the 3rd of April 2018, the Telegraph

Newspaper carried the story that “Banks fined £3.7bn for rigging

foreign exchange markets”. The banks in question were Barclays,
Royal Bank of Scotland, JPMorgan, UBS, Bank of America and

Citigroup who were hit with huge currency manipulation

penalties by UK and US authorities and collectively they were
fined $6 billion for foreign exchange manipulation.

Barclays was handed the biggest UK bank fine in history when the
FCA ordered Barclays to pay £284.4m as part of the British bank’s

£1.5bn settlement with the City watchdog and four US regulators.

Regulators detailed how traders
at the banks, referring to

themselves with names such as

“The Cartel”, colluded to rig
euro-dollar currency

benchmarks, profiting at the
expense of customers with one Barclay’s trader in electronic chats

writng "if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying", while others used

hand signals to cheat clients and fix financial markets. The foreign
exchange market is worth around $5.3 trillion-a-day in

transactions.

Such mark-ups "represented a key revenue source for Barclays"
and were a high priority for sales staff, regulators said. One

individual working as a vice-president at Barclays suggested that

the maximum mark-up should be added wherever possible. (1)