Four banks fined over chatroom exchanges - Deutsche escapes for alerting CMA

Deutsche Bank has been granted immunity from an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority that has seen four others fined over £100 million. Royal Bank of Canada, Citi, HSBC and Morgan Stanley have until April to pay their fines - which resulted from a probe into illegal sharing of price-sensitive information on trading in gilts and gilt asset swaps after quantitative easing began during the global financial crisis.

By Neasa MacErlean

The breaches involved just six United Kingdom-based traders - two from RBC and one each from the others. Conversations took place one-to-one in online Bloomberg chatrooms. Deutsche was the most heavily involved, participating in 73 of the 76 exchanges, followed by RBC (41), then Citi (15), HSBC (12) and Morgan Stanley (11). The only discussions in which Deutsche was not included were three between Citi and Morgan Stanley. None of the traders is still with the bank that employed them at the time.