WASHINGTON: Barclays has reached a $100 million multi-state settlement over charges that it manipulated the Libor interest rate benchmark, the New York Attorney General said Monday.
The settlement with 44 states marks the latest in a series of enforcement actions the bank has faced in connection with Libor manipulation.
In 2012, Barclays reached a $453 million agreement with the Justice Department, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and British authorities to settle parallel charges.
As part of its agreement with the Justice Department, Barclays admitted to wrongdoing that occurred between August 2005 and May 2008, when certain traders at the bank called their counterparts at competing institutions and colluded to submit Libor rates that benefited their trading positions.
Barclays is one of several banks to be caught up in rate-rigging scandals. Other banks that have reached settlements with US authorities in connection with Libor include UBS , Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank and ICAP.
Schneiderman said Monday that Barclays is the first bank of several under investigation by state attorneys general to reach a settlement and that it cooperated with the state probe. He said that as a result of the rate-rigging, government entities and non-profits were "defrauded of millions" when they entered into swap contracts with Barclays.
"There has to be one set of rules for everyone, no matter how rich or how powerful, and that includes big banks and other financial institutions that engage in fraud or impair the fair functioning of financial markets," he said in a statement.
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