Ten major banks, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, will pay $46 million to settle a long-running antitrust lawsuit that accused them of colluding to rig the $465.9 trillion interest rate swap market.
Lawyers for the investors filed a preliminary agreement in Manhattan federal court Thursday that ends the eight-year-old domestic case.
The settlement must be approved by District Judge Paul Oetken and brings the total value of all settlements in the case to $71 million.
The other banks party to the settlement are Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, NatWest and UBS.
Investors led by the city of Baltimore and pension funds in Chicago, Los Angeles and Michigan have accused the banks of trying to corner swaps trading between 2013 and 2016, in part by boycotting three emerging platforms that offered better prices and allowed buy-side investors to trade with each other.
This would have led to “huge profits” for the banks because of their brokerage role, mainly in the form of bid-ask spreads, investors said.
Credit Suisse, now part of UBS, agreed in 2022 to pay $25 million to settle investor claims. Another judge dismissed a twelfth bank, HSBC, as a defendant in 2017.
All banks have denied wrongdoing.
Mr. Oetken’s refusal in December to certify a class action has made the investors’ case more difficult, because it is often more expensive and not worth the hassle for individual investors to file a lawsuit on their own. own authority.
Lawyers for the investors did not immediately respond to requests for comment. They called the settlement an “excellent recovery” given the challenges of pursuing the litigation, according to court documents.
Interest rate swaps allow parties to exchange future interest payments, usually by exchanging a fixed rate for a variable rate, in order to manage risk or bet on whether rates will rise or fall.
The case is part of more than a decade of litigation in Manhattan accusing major banks of colluding in various markets, including interest rate benchmarks, U.S. Treasuries, currencies and commodities.
Il s’agit de l’affaire In re : Interest Rate Swaps Antitrust Litigation, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, n° 16-md-02704.
