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BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Nomura, UBS and UniCredit were fined a total of 371 million euros ($452 million) by EU antitrust regulators on Thursday for taking part in a European government bonds trading cartel.
The penalties are the latest to hit the financial industry in connection with several foreign exchange cartels, Euribor and Libor benchmark cartels, and bonds cartels.
The European Commission said Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), RBS (LON:NWG) (now known as NatWest), Natixis and WestLB (now known as Portigon) also took part in the cartel.
Natwest escaped a 260-million-euro fine as it alerted the cartel to the EU competition watchdog. Bank of America and Natixis were also not fined either because their infringement falls outside the limitation period for imposition of fines, the Commission said.
It said Portigon, the legal and economic successor to WestLB, received a zero fine as it did not generate any net turnover in the last business year.
“A well-functioning European government bonds market is paramount both for the eurozone member states issuing these bonds to generate liquidity and the investors buying and trading them,” European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
The Commission said the cartel ran from 2007 to 2011, with traders from the banks informing and updating each other on their prices and volumes offered in the run up to the auctions and the prices shown to their customers or to the market in general via multilateral chatrooms on Bloomberg terminals.
($1 = 0.8207 euros)
