The European Commission fined four banks a total of €344 million (U.S. $389 million) for their participation in a trader-driven scheme to manipulate the foreign exchange spot market.
Through an investigation, the sixth such its conducted since 2013, the European Commission concluded traders from UBS, Barclays, NatWest (formerly RBS), HSBC, and Credit Suisse breached EU antitrust rules when they used an online professional chat room to exchange “sensitive information and trading plans, and occasionally coordinated their trading strategies” regarding nearly a dozen prominent currencies, the Commission said in a press release Thursday.
