The European Commission found on Thursday 20 May that Bank of America, Natixis, Nomura, RBS (now NatWest), UBS, UniCredit and WestLB (now Portigon) had breached EU antitrust rules through the participation of a group of traders in a cartel in the primary and secondary market for European Government Bonds (‘EGB’).
Nomura (€129.5 million), UBS (€172.4 million) and UniCredit (€69.4 million) were fined. NatWest escapes this, as it revealed the cartel. Bank of America and Natixis escaped the penalty (zero fine for Portigon).
Margrethe Vestager, executive vice-president for competition policy, says the decision “sends a clear message that the Commission will not tolerate any kind of collusive behaviour”.
The seven banks participated in a cartel through a group of traders working on their EGB desks. These traders were in regular contact with each other in multilateral chat rooms on Bloomberg terminals. They exchanged commercially sensitive information and updated each other on their prices and volumes offered in the run up to the auctions and the prices shown to their customers. They discussed their bidding strategy in the run up to the auctions of the Eurozone Member States when issuing Euro denominated bonds on the primary market.
Link to the case: https://bit.ly/3hKrDwv (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)