Top Rabobank trader banned for rate rigging
A FORMER senior trader at Rabobank was yesterday banned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) over Libor rate-rigging.
Paul Robson is the first trader to be banned by the City regulator for attempted Libor manipulation.
The FCA action follows a US criminal conviction for Robson over interest rate-rigging.
He was the second person at the Dutch bank to plead guilty to trying to rig the yen Libor rate and the first Briton to do so.
Georgina Philippou, acting director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said in a statement: “No excuse can be made for Robson’s behaviour, which was particularly serious. He was the primary submitter of yen Libor at Rabobank for a number of years and experienced in the market. He knew what he was doing was wrong.”
Last year, Rabobank paid $1bn (£597m) to US and European regulators for its part in the global rate-rigging scandal.
Barclays Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Bank have all previously been fined for rate-rigging.
Robson pleaded guilty to attempting to influence Libor rates. He will be sentenced in 2017.
Libor – London interbank offered rate is one of the interest rates used by global banks to lend money to each other.
It supports hundreds of trillions of dollars of transactions and is used to set interest rates on credit cards, student loans and mortgages.
Regulators in the US and Europe have been investigating whether banks attempted to manipulate this and other key interest rates to benefit their own trading positions.