Company: Royal Bank of Scotland Group

A federal judge in New York has rejected UBS AG's bid to dismiss a federal regulator's lawsuit accusing it of misleading Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into buying billions of dollars of risky mortgage debt.

Financial firms in Britain, including banks hit in 2011 by the euro zone debt crisis, have started taking on new staff again, confounding forecasts for more lay-offs, according to a new industry survey.

1st paragraph of story should go Britain's Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulator has fined Coutts — the exclusive private bank owned by Royal Bank of Scotland — 8.75 million pounds ($13.9 million) for failings in its anti-money laundering controls systems. here

Royal Bank of Scotland is closing its equity capital market and corporate finance units in South Korea and cash equities businesses in Indonesia, Korea and Singapore affecting 70 people as part of moves to cut the size of its investment bank.

Regulators may try to prevent Wall Street from driving commodities prices higher or lower by denying the right to own commodity trading empires: warehouses, storage tanks, and other hard assets worth billions.

The U.S. Justice Department is conducting a criminal probe into whether the world's biggest banks manipulated a global benchmark rate that is at the heart of a wide range of loans and derivatives, from trillions of dollars of mortgages and bonds to interest rate swaps , a person familiar with the matter said.

Britain’s two part-nationalized banks plan to tap the European Central Bank’s special three-year funding scheme for a combined amount of about 15 billion euros ($20 billion), on a par with some of the euro zone’s largest banks, the Financial Times reports.

A group of traders and brokers had successfully managed to manipulate key interbank lending rates that affect loans around the world, one of the banks being investigated has told Canadian regulators, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Computers and Bloomberg terminals dominate trading floors, but the human element remains a crucial feature of transacting across derivatives and other parts of the global financial system, the Financial Times reports.

Britain's banking industry, dominated by four big players, may need another investigation by the country's anti-trust regulator due to lack of progress in opening up the sector to competition, Britain's main consumer watchdog said on Thursday.

Moody's warned on Thursday it may cut the credit ratings of 17 global and 114 European financial institutions in another sign that the impact of the euro zone government debt crisis is spreading throughout the global financial system.

Britain's top banks fell short of their government targets to lend to small businesses last year, Bank of England data showed on Monday, dealing a blow to the Conservative-led coalition's hopes to get credit flowing through the economy to boost growth.

Several British bankers have been arrested as part of an investigation into alleged tax-related criminal offences, the country's customs and revenue service said on Sunday, including some from Royal Bank of Scotland.

David Cameron has called for a truce in the battle over bank bonuses in an attempt to repair fractured relations with the City and draw a line under weeks of public acrimony. The FT reports.

Germany's Deutsche Bank will defer any part of an employee's bonus above 200,000 euros ($264,800) this year, a source close to the bank said, making it the latest industry player to limit pay in the face of fierce criticism of the industry.