"During the course of these investigations, we discovered behaviour of certain employees that is unacceptable"
- UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti
The largest bank in Switzerland has agreed to pay $1.53 billion in fines to settle charges of rigging the Libor benchmark rate. UBS became already the second bank to be fined over Libor after Barclays was forced to pay $450m to U.S. and U.K. authorities. All fines will be paid to three different institutions: the U.S. Department of Justice and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission will receive $1.2 billion; £160m will be paid to the UK's Financial Services Authority, while £40m will be transferred to the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority. During the last few years, scandals not only caused financial losses, but also led to the thousand employees being redundant.
"I need you to keep it as low as possible," Trader A wrote to the broker on Sept. 18, 2008, referring to six-month yen Libor. "If you do that ... I'll pay you, you know, $50,000, $100,000... Whatever you want ... I'm a man of my word," according to transcripts released by the U.K. Financial Services Authority today.
"During the course of these investigations, we discovered behaviour of certain employees that is unacceptable. We have cooperated fully with the authorities and taken decisive and appropriate actions to correct the issues and to strengthen our control processes and procedures," said UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti on the UBS website.
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