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By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS, Nov 5 (Reuters) - EU antitrust regulators are setto impose multi-million euro fines on Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, andthree other banks for suspected rigging of the Euribor interestrate benchmark, a person familiar with the matter said onTuesday.
Credit Agricole, Societe Generale andHSBC will also be hit with fines, the source said.Barclays, which alerted the European Commission to thesuspected wrongdoing, will not be fined.
The move comes two years after the Commission, the EU'santitrust authority, raided a number of global banks forsuspected fixing of Euribor, the benchmark used as the basis forpricing 250-trillion-euros-worth of financial contracts, fromSpanish mortgages to complex derivatives.
The source said some of the banks had agreed to settle withthe Commission in exchange for a 10 percent reduction in theirfines. The announcement is expected to be made next month.
The EU can impose fines of up to 10 percent of a company'sglobal revenue for breaches of antitrust rules. In this case,the fines are likely to be towards the low end of the scale, thesource said. However, since all the banks have revenues of atleast 16 billion euros a year, even a one percent fine wouldresult in hundreds of millions of euros in penalties.
HSBC posted revenues of $63.5 billion last year, while RBSearned 25.8 billion pounds, Societe Generale 23.1 billion euros,Deutsche Bank 33.5 billion and Credit Agricole 16.3 billioneuros. JP Morgan earned $97 billion.
Several of the banks will not be fined immediately as theyare contesting the size of the proposed penalties. In thosecases, the banks are likely to face formal charges next month,followed by fines next year, the source said.
RBS, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale and HSBC declined tocomment. Credit Agricole and JP Morgan were not immediatelyavailable to comment. (Writing by Luke Baker)
