By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -UBS on Wednesday lost an initial legal challenge against a 172.4-million-euro ($186 million) EU cartel fine as Europe’s second-top court largely sided with EU antitrust regulators.
The European Commission in its 2021 decision, which had imposed a total fine of 371 million euros ($400 million), said Bank of America; RBS, now called NatWest; Natixis; and WestLB, renamed Portigon, were in a cartel from 2007 to 2011.
UniCredit’s and Nomura’s fines were trimmed in the court decision on Wednesday.
The Luxembourg-based General Court said its ruling largely confirms the EC’s decision while moderately reducing the fines on UniCredit and Nomura.
“Any anticompetitive conduct on the part of an employee is attributable to the undertaking to which he or she belongs. Accordingly, banks are liable for the conduct of their traders,” judges said.
A UBS spokesperson said the bank would evaluate the decision and consider whether to file an appeal.
UniCredit said it was considering a possible appeal, adding it “disagreed with the Court’s findings regarding UniCredit’s participation in the infringement”.
The EU antitrust decision had said the banks’ traders exchanged information on prices and volumes offered in the run-up to the auctions and shared prices being shown to customers or the market in general via multilateral chatrooms on Bloomberg terminals.
All the banks except for NatWest, which alerted the cartel to the authorities, subsequently challenged the EU decision at the Luxembourg-based General Court, Europe’s second-highest.
Nomura’s 129.6 million euro fine was trimmed to 125.6 million and UniCredit’s 69.4 million euro penalty cut to 65 million.
The EU competition watchdog had not fined Bank of America and Natixis because their infringement fell outside the limitation period for the imposition of fines, while Portigon’s fine was cancelled because it did not have any net turnover in the last business year.
The banks and the Commission can appeal only on points of law to the Court of Justice of the European Union, Europe’s highest.
European and U.S. regulators have imposed billions of euros in fines on the banking sector in the last two decades for activities that included the rigging of various benchmark indices.
The cases are -441/21 UBS Group et UBS v Commission, T-449/21 Natixis v Commission, T-453/21 UniCredit and UniCredit Bank v Commission, T-455/21 Nomura International et Nomura Holdings v Commission, T-456/21 Bank of America and Bank of America Corporation and T-462/21 Portigon v Commission (European government bonds).
($1 = 0.9266 euros)
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Additional reporting by Ariane Luthi and Valentina Za; Editing by Jane Merriman and Richard Chang)
