Deutsche Bank hit with $2.5B fine due to rate rigging
Deutsche Bank will pay fines totaling $2.5 billion, and must terminate and ban certain employees who engaged in interest-rate rigging, New York State's superintendent of financial services announced Thursday.
The penalty will see the bank pay $600 million to the New York State Department of Financial Services, $800 million to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, $775 million to the Justice Department and £227 million ($340 million) to the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority.
"Deutsche Bank employees engaged in a widespread effort to manipulate benchmark interest rates for financial gain," Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky said in a statement.
"While a number of the employees involved in misconduct have already left the bank, those that remain are being terminated or banned from the New York banking system. We must remember that markets do not just manipulate themselves: It takes deliberate wrongdoing by individuals."
The bank's London subsidiary will plead guilty following the investigation into the manipulation of the Libor rate—a benchmark for short-term interest rates around the world, the U.S. Justice Department said.
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The U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority said the misconduct involved at least 29 Deutsche Bank individuals, including managers, traders and submitters, who were primarily based in London, but also in Frankfurt, Tokyo and New York.
Georgina Philippou, the agency's acting director of enforcement and market oversight, said that one division at Deutsche Bank had "a culture of generating profits without proper regard to the integrity of the market."
"This wasn't limited to a few individuals but, on certain desks, it appeared deeply ingrained," she said in a statement. "Deutsche Bank's failings were compounded by them repeatedly misleading us. The bank took far too long to produce vital documents and it moved far too slowly to fix relevant systems and controls."
Deutsche Bank is the latest in a string of banks to be hit with fines relating to the Libor scandal.
Swiss bank UBS was fined $1.5 billion by authorities for interest-rate manipulation, the U.K.'s RBS was fined $612 million and Barclays paid a $450 million penalty.