“Banks including Bank of America Corp., Barclays Plc (BARC) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) won dismissal of antitrust claims in lawsuits alleging they rigged the London interbank offered rate.
More than two dozen interrelated lawsuits are before U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in New York alleging the banks conspired to depress Libor by understating their borrowing costs, thereby lowering their interest expenses on products tied to the rates. Potential damages were estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
Buchwald yesterday issued a 161-page ruling dismissing antitrust allegations against the banks while allowing some commodities-manipulations claims to proceed to a trial.
“We recognize that it might be unexpected that we are dismissing a substantial portion of plaintiffs’ claims, given that several of the defendants here have already paid penalties to government regulatory agencies reaching into the billions of dollars,” Buchwald wrote. “There are many requirements that private plaintiffs must satisfy but which government agencies need not.”
Libor is a key metric for setting interest rates for trillions of dollars in financial instruments. It fixes the rates under which banks lend money to one another for as little as a day and as long as a year. Rates for 10 different currencies including the U.S. dollar, Japanese yen and British pound are computed daily after canvassing banks that comprise membership panels for each type of money.
