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Financial district in London: "undermining the integrity of the financial sector"
Photo: PAUL ELLIS / AFP
A cartel made up of British and Swiss banks has to pay fines in the hundreds of millions.
The EU Commission imposed the fine because the banks are said to have made illegal agreements on the foreign exchange business.
The major London bank HSBC and three other credit institutions have to pay a good 344 million euros, as the European competition watchdog announced.
Because the major Swiss bank UBS cooperated with the authorities and informed them about the cartel, the commission suspended the sentence against them.
The banks agreed on so-called forex transactions, which involve converting currencies.
They would have "undermined the integrity of the financial industry and harmed the European economy and consumers," said Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.
Traders discussed each other in the chat room
The agreements are said to have taken place in a chat room called "Sterling Lads".
The NatWest bank said that the employee in question no longer worked for the bank and that the internal culture had "fundamentally changed" since then.
Traders are said to have exchanged central information and coordinated strategies in the chat room.
According to Brussels, the largest single fine is attributable to HSBC, which has to pay a good 174 million euros.
The Swiss institute Crédit Suisse received the second largest fine of a good 83 million euros.
Unlike that of the other banks, it was not reduced because, from the point of view of the competition watchdog, the institute did not cooperate.
Further fines in the tens of millions were made by Barclays Bank and RBS.
The EU Commission has been investigating such cases for years. Most recently, she had fined more than one billion euros in 2019. Overall, some of the largest banks in the world have had to pay more than $ 11 billion in fines in the US and Europe since 2013.
The major London bank HSBC in particular keeps making headlines because it is involved in business of questionable legality.
In September the European Observatory on Tax Policy published a study on how European banks shift their profits to tax havens.
HSBC was at the top of the list in Europe: the bank posted 58 percent of its pre-tax profits in tax havens, especially in the former British colony of Hong Kong.
In September last year, the largest bank in Europe kept appearing in the »FinCEN files«, a research carried out by the research group »ICIJ«.
There it was said that the big bank was acting too cautiously against money laundering.
jlk / AFP / Reuters
