BRUSSELS: The European Union is going bananas as it pursues a probe into currency-rigging.
Antitrust regulators are seeking to bolster their case against some of the world’s biggest banks using a March ruling at the EU’s top court in a banana cartel involving Dole Food Co..
“The commission will be encouraged by the ruling” and “will want to build on it,” said Lambros Kilaniotis, a lawyer at Reynolds Porter Chamberlain LLP in London who isn’t involved in the foreign-exchange probe.
The judgment allows the EU to build a case merely by showing that foreign exchange traders’ chat-room conversations reduced uncertainty, enabling them to know which way markets were headed, said Kilaniotis. Such communications may be presumed anticompetitive by the EU even without proving banks actually profited from the information sharing.
Any antitrust fines would add to about $10 billion in penalties issued by authorities in the U.S. and Europe over the past year for what U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch called a “brazen display of collusion” to game markets. Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays Plc and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc agreed last month to plead guilty to felony charges of conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros, according to settlements announced by the Justice Department in Washington.
HSBC Holdings Plc, which has also been fined for its role in currency rigging, said last year that its foreign-exchange trading is being reviewed by the EU and it’s cooperating with regulators.
