A U.S. District Court judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits against major banks that were charged in rigging the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR).
Bloomberg News reports that the banks were the subjects of more than two dozen interrelated cases brought by the brokerage firm Charles Schwab Corp., pension funds and other bondholders. However, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate any actual harm from the banks' alleged LIBOR manipulation.
‘We recognize that it might be unexpected that we are dismissing a substantial portion of the plaintiffs' claims, given that several of the defendants here have already paid penalties to government regulatory agencies reaching into the billions of dollars,’ Buchwald wrote in her ruling. ‘There are many requirements that private plaintiffs must satisfy but which government agencies need not.’
Buchwald also dismissed some commodities-manipulation claims, stating that they were based on transactions that occurred too long ago, but she allowed some commodities-manipulation claims to proceed to trial.
The banks being sued were Bank of America Corp., Barclays PLC, Citigroup Inc., Credit Suisse Group, Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings PLC, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Royal Bank of Scotland.