Kito news today27 Jul 2018 14:13
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. judge has dismissed five large banks from two antitrust lawsuits by investors alleging multi-year conspiracies to rig prices for hundreds of billions of dollars of transactions in the global silver and gold markets.
U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni threw out all claims over alleged silver price-fixing against Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), Barclays Plc (BARC.L), BNP Paribas SA (BNPP.PA), Standard Chartered Plc (STAN.L) and UBS Group AG (UBSG.S).
The Manhattan judge also dismissed UBS from the gold-fixing case. Her decisions issued on Wednesday night totaled 87 pages.
Vincent Briganti, a lawyer for the silver investors, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Daniel Brockett, a lawyer for the gold investors, declined to comment.
The cases are among several in Manhattan accusing big banks of manipulating financial markets at investors’ expense.
Silver investors had accused Bank of Nova Scotia (“ScotiaBank”) (BNS.TO), Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE) and HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA.L) of fixing prices from 2007 to 2013.
After settling with Deutsche Bank for $38 million in 2016, the investors obtained 350,000 pages of documents and 75 audio tapes, including chat messages, that they said offered “smoking gun” evidence that the five other banks broke the law despite not being part of the fix.
One chat message came from a Paribas trader who wrote: “CANT WAIT FOR ANOTHER DAY WHEN WE GET THE BULLDOZER OUT THE GARAGE ON GOLD OR SIL, THEY ARE MY FIRST PORT OF CALL HAHAHAHAHAH.”
But the judge found no overarching conspiracy among fixing and non-fixing banks