EU competition regulators are set to impose multi-million euro fines on Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and three other banks for suspected rigging of the Euribor interest rate benchmark, a person familiar with the matter said today.
Credit Agricole, Societe Generale and HSBC will also be hit with fines, the sources said, according to Reuters.
Barclays, which alerted the European Commission to the suspected wrongdoing, will not be fined.
The move comes two years after the Commission, the EU's competition authority, raided a number of global banks for suspected fixing of Euribor.
Euribor is the benchmark used as the basis for pricing €250 trillion worth of financial contracts, from Spanish mortgages to complex derivatives.
The source said some of the banks had agreed to settle with the Commission in exchange for a 10% reduction in their fines. The announcement is expected to be made next month.
The EU can impose fines of up to 10% of a company's global revenue for breaches of competition rules. In this case, the fines are likely to be towards the low end of the scale, the source said.
However, since all the banks have revenues of at least €16 billion a year, even a 1% fine would result in hundreds of millions of euros in penalties.
HSBC posted revenues of $63.5 billion last year, while RBS earned £25.8 billion, Societe Generale €23.1 billion, Deutsche Bank €33.5 billion and Credit Agricole €16.3 billion. JP Morgan earned $97 billion.
Several of the banks will not be fined immediately as they are contesting the size of the proposed penalties. In those cases, the banks are likely to face formal charges next month, followed by fines next year, the source said.
RBS, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale and HSBC declined to comment.
