A Wall Street Journal report said that on Monday, British fraud prosecutors unveiled plans to file a criminal lawsuit against three former employees of Barclays PLC over allegations of benchmark interest rates manipulation. The US newspaper said that the latest move has broadened and already widening global investigation into Libor, or the London interbank offered rate.
Peter Johnson, Jonathan Mathew and Stylianos Contogoulas will be charged by the Serious Fraud Office of the UK with conspiracy to defraud between June 2005 and August 2007. WSJ said that the new charges would bring the number of individuals criminally sued in the US and UK Libor investigation since 2012 to 13.
Lawyers for Johnson, Mathew and Contogoulas did not immediately respond or declined to comment on the UK regulator's announcement. A spokeswoman for Barclay also refused to comment to WSJ either.
The paper said that the charges brought against the ex-Barclays employees were not related to the rate-manipulation investigation led by former UBS AG and Citigroup Inc trader Tom Hayes, who has also been filed fraud-related charges. Hayes entered a not guilty plea to charges brought against him by the UK.
On the other hand, WSJ said barclays was the first bank that settled rate-manipulation investigations conducted by the US and UK in 2012. The bank then paid $454 million in order to resolve the case and admitted that they have done wrong in relation to the rate-manipulation.
WSJ said that Barclays is among the 16 banks that set the Libor benchmark through submission of estimates at a daily basis on how much for each bank to spend in order to loan money from other banks. in 2012, the Financial Conduct Authority said that barclay's traders asked its rate submitters to provide false information to benefit their positions between 2005 and 2009. WSJ said that Johnson and Mathew worked as rate submitters at Barclays, while Contogoulas was working at a trader that time.
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