Court of Appeal Opens the Door to LIBOR and Benchmark Misrepresentation Claims

Property Alliance Group Ltd v The Royal Bank of Scotland Plc [2018] EWCA Civ 355 (02 March 2018)

Infamously, the London Inter-bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) used to be a code word for corruption in the world of finance. In more ways than one, it is still a dirty word from the point of view of ethics. However, even now, despite planning to phase it out by 2021 and replacing it with a proxy, the FCA calls LIBOR a “systemically important benchmark”. Property Alliance Group (PAG) appealed Asplin J’s decision to dismiss its claims against the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) arising out of interest rate swap agreements. RBS advanced funds to PAG at interest rates referenced to LIBOR, which was published relying upon submissions from panels of banks on borrowing rates. These proceedings arose out of four swaps that RBS sold to PAG between 2004 and the spring of 2008. The first swap had a trade date of 6 October 2004 and a notional amount of £10 million. The second swap had a trade date of 25 September 2007 and a notional amount of £15 million for 4 years and then £30 million for a further six years. The third swap had a trade date of 14 January 2008 and a notional amount of £20 million. The fourth swap had a trade date of 16 April 2008 and a notional amount of £15 million. The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 trigged a fall in interest rates. All the swaps were tied to 3 month GBP LIBOR which plummeted and stayed low. The upshot was that the rates of interest that PAG was paying under the swaps far exceeded what it was receiving under them.

One consequence of the prolonged period of unusually low interest rates was that the swaps had a very large negative market-to-market value (MTM) from PAG’s point of view. The break cost incurred by PAG in 2011 was correspondingly substantial. PAG issued proceedings in 2013 seeking relief by way of rescission of the swaps and/or damages. The claims were divided into three categories: “the swaps claims”, which involved allegations of misrepresentation, misstatement and breach of contract on the part of RBS in connection with its proposal and sale of the swaps to PAG; “the LIBOR claims” which rested on RBS’s knowledge of and participation in manipulation of LIBOR rates; and “the GRG claims” by which PAG complained of breaches of contract arising out of its transfer to, and subsequent management within the controversial Global Restructuring Group to which RBS transferred its relationship with PAG in 2010. Asplin J dismissed the claims in their entirety. However, despite dismissing the onward appeal, light of the circumstances Sir Terence Etherton MR, Longmore and Newey LJJ were satisfied that RBS did make some representation to the effect that RBS itself was not manipulating and did not intend to manipulate LIBOR.

Conduct Costs on the Rise (2012-2016): No End in Sight

The latest findings on misconduct in financial services reveal an upward trend in conduct costs. During the five-year period 2012-2016, the world’s 20 leading banks have paid £264bn for bad behaviour. This represents an increase of 32pc on the period 2008-12. A worrying aspect of adverse bank behaviour is reflected in the uninhibited expansion of conduct cost provisioning. The key question, explains Chris Stears, relates to the average level at which these costs will settle. “We find ourselves wondering when, if ever, the level of conduct costs will start to decrease,” is how Roger McCormick puts it five years after publishing the first league table for international bank fines. These concerns can only be magnified by new developments such as the Royal Bank of Scotland’s recent $5.5bn settlement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency to resolve toxic mortgage claims in relation to the lender’s issuance and underwriting of approximately $32bn of residential mortgage-backed securities in America. Equally, the fact that the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is suing major British banks for $400bn cannot possibly alleviate people’s worries or instil confidence in banking institutions. Brought on behalf of 39 rescued American banks, the US government’s claim in London relates to LIBOR “lowballing” and the defendants include household names such as such as Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland. Even partial success in a claim of this nature could radically enhance the present level of conduct costs.

But still all this is only the gentle way in punishment. Conversely, the Qatari crisis that has hit Barclays may well trigger the beginning of the end for high-powered management personnel who have thus far generally enjoyed immunity from criminal justice. Ongoing fraud investigations against Barclays and John Varley (former CEO), Roger Jenkins (former Executive Chairman) and Richard Boath (former European Head) must have sent shockwaves through out the banking industry. The trio’s trial will undoubtedly be a closely watched and studied event and if they are convicted the game-changing Qatari fiasco shall define things for future times. The US authorities have also charged two managers from Société Générale, for participation in a scheme to rig US dollar LIBOR. Danielle Sindzingre and Muriel Bescond boosted Société Générale’s creditworthiness by submitting false information in relation to the rates at which the bank would be able to borrow money. As we already know the “numbers tell a story” and since the risks are very great “in the case of bank behaviour, they speak louder than words, and they tell a big, and scandalous, story.”

Catalyst for Change: Towards a Model of Conduct Costs in Pakistan

Reposted from the Conduct Costs Pakistan Blog which I have recently started. As measured by the CCP Research Foundation, in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers seven years ago, global “conduct costs” are approaching stratospheric levels and are presently estimated to be $300 billion. But none of the data reflected in the final sum can be traced to Pakistan – a market economy whose legal system closely resembles the English legal system, despite the politically retrograde Islamisation of the 1980s – in clear and unambiguous terms. This blog is written with the ambition of articulating a conduct costs’ model in Pakistan, a developing country which is in need of such analysis so that its 192 million people are put in a position to make informed choices about banking and financial services.

In constitutional terms, a sound basis for the study of conduct costs can be found in Articles 37 and 38 of the Constitution of Pakistan 1973. Laid down in Part II: Fundamental Rights and Principles of Policy, Chapter 2: Principles of Policy of the Constitution, Article 37 requires the state to promote social justice and Article 38 imposes on the state a duty to promote the people’s social and economic well-being. On an alternative level, in The End of Alchemy, Professor Mervyn King relies on all his experience as a central banker to explain the wider dynamics of the global economy. He invites us to embrace the underlying theoretical argument that banks are “the Achilles heel of capitalism”. This attractive proposition is as advantageous a place to begin a study of the banks in Pakistan as it is in the west.

King and Country: Reflections on the Costs of Market Misconduct

Read as updated SSRN paper with reference to the Panama Papers. Because of the Budget 2016, the chancellor has been accused of “looking more like Gordon Brown as a purveyor of gimmicks.” In difficult times when calls for his scalp over the row regarding the budget seemed to have eclipsed everything else, the rare bit of good news for George Osborne is that he can use the opportunity provided by the threat of Brexit – “a leap in the dark” which may cost the UK £100 billion or 5 per cent of GDP and 950,000 jobs by 2020 – to camouflage and obfuscate the real problems of conduct in the world of economics and finance. On the other hand, in an important interview with Charles Moore the former Bank of England governor Mervyn King showed hallmark signs of euroscepticism and said the people need to make up their own minds about the upcoming referendum. King also warned that lenders have not stopped taking excessive risks with savers’ money and the result is “bankers have not learnt the lessons of the Great Crash”. Unsurprisingly, in his somewhat controversial new book The End of Alchemy he makes the case against financial sorcery by arguing that it must be squeezed out of the world’s banking system. Perhaps, such failings are amplified further because “financial crises are a fact of life” and we are “moving into a rerun of the credit crunch”. Indeed, Lord King calls banks “the Achilles heel of capitalism.”

Below I sketch important/emerging issues in the intersecting themes of economics, law and misconduct as seen in the media, especially through the lens of “conduct costs” – some other themes are also explored. Mentioning Walter Bagehot and his classic text Lombard Street, which argued that the BoE should provide short-term financial support in times of crisis, King advises us that the old “lender of last resort” model (LOLR) is in need of revision because “banking has changed almost out of recognition since Bagehot’s time.” The former governor argues that the time has come to replace LOLR with the pawnbroker for all seasons (PFAS) system. For him, it is time for financial institutions to drop LOLR and embrace PFAS and be prepared to advance funds to just about anyone who has sufficient collateral. “The essential problem with the traditional LOLR,” argues King “is that in the presence of alchemy, the only way to provide sufficient liquidity in a crisis is to lend against bad collateral – at inadequate haircuts and low or zero penalty rates.”

LIBOR Roundup: Fraud, Misrepresentation and New Directions in Civil Proceedings

ICE Benchmark Administration, which took over LIBOR from the BBA in 2014, has published a roadmap for LIBOR and banks will no longer be able to manipulate the interbank rate once a new system comes into place this summer connecting the IBA’s computers to banks’ trading systems. “We built new systems to do the surveillance which run about 4m calculations every day, looking for collusion, or aberrant behaviour, or possible manipulation,” explained the IBA’s president Finbarr Hutcheson. He expressed confidence that traders will no longer be able to lie to improve their trading positions and said that anomalies would be investigated and reported to the FCA. The banks have paid billions in fines in relation to the benchmark’s manipulation. The Wheatley Review 2012 engineered and guided LIBOR’s transformation because the distorted benchmark, underpinning more than US$350 trillion in outstanding contracts, was “not fit for purpose”. But of course, the review’s author Martin Wheatley was ousted from office because of his overt aggressiveness, or his “shoot first” and “ask questions later” policy for bad banks. Under IBA oversight, daily LIBOR rates will be rooted in market transactions “to the greatest possible extent” by using a “waterfall” system devised to begin with transactions but relies on human input in circumstances when trading volumes decline.

IBA is extremely confident that the move will bring rectitude to the scandal ridden financial sector. Hutcheson said that coupled with the earlier changes, the roadmap will ultimately make LIBOR “one of the world’s most trusted, scrutinised and robust financial benchmarks.” Insofar as benchmark rigging from the old days is concerned, after the settlement (2014) in the series of reported judgments in the Graiseley Properties case, new claims have been brought and a series of fresh judgments were published in litigation arising out of disputes between the Property Alliance Group – a property developer with a portfolio worth about £200 million – and the Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS has been in the spotlight recently because of the fact that it has failed to generate profit for eight successive years and that its losses since the global financial crisis 2008 have exceeded £50 billion which is more than the £45 billion of taxpayers’ money used to bail out the ailing institution.

Navinder Sarao: ‘Flash Crash’ Trader’s Extradition Request Upheld

The Government of the United States of America v Navinder Singh Sarao (23 March 2016)

The case of Nav Sarao, the “hound of Hounslow” who faces a potential sentence of 380 years’ imprisonment on 22 counts in the US, has inflamed emotions and commentators have expressed extreme sympathy with the rogue trader who is considered to be the main culprit behind the “flash crash” of 6 May 2010. The disproportionate nature of his predicament is clearly illustrated by the fact that if extradited and punished in America, Sarao may well receive a harsher sentence than Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadic who got 40 years for crimes against humanity and genocide but will enjoy the right to a lengthy appeals process. It has been argued that Sarao had to be caged because he discovered a way to beat the HFTs at their own game. At the time of his arrest, senior traders even made public statements about footing his legal bill. Seldom has a corporate crime case aroused such a passionate response. Fellow traders dubbed Sarao “our spoofing hero” and the case against him was labelled “ridiculous”. Yet in the Westminster magistrates’ court judge Quentin Purdy disagreed and found that Sarao was extraditable to the US on the charges levelled against him. On the other hand, in making factual findings in the case, judge Purdy found that the downturn in the market was not attributable to a single event and the cause of the flash crash “cannot on any view be laid wholly or mostly at Navinder Sarao’s door” because even though he was active on 6 May 2010 the date “is only a single trading day in over 400 relied upon by the prosecution.”

Against this, the Commodities Trading Futures Commission accuses the Brit of exacerbating the flash crash and claims he “was at least significantly responsible for the order imbalances” in the derivatives market which affected stock markets to make matters worse on the day. The judge found that if found guilty of market abuse under UK law, Sarao’s activity would result in a sentence of 12 months’ imprisonment being imposed on him and so the dual criminality test in section 137 of the Extradition Act 2003 was satisfied. He also stressed the importance of the public interest in upholding the controversial UK-US Extradition Treaty. Sarao is accused of engaging in a ferocious campaign to manipulate the price of the E-mini S&P 500 on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange by relying on a variety of exceptionally large, aggressive and persistent spoofing tactics.

Benchmark Manipulation and Corporate Crime: Insights on Financial Misconduct

In the second innings things were different. The reverse swinging old ball meant that the Serious Fraud Office’s openers came back to the pavilion with a duck and those charged with misconduct and put in the dock began to eye up the opportunity of scoring a hat trick. Coupled with the reduction in Hayes’s sentence by the Court of Appeal (Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd CJ, Sir Brian Leveson PQBD and Gloster LJ, see here) on the ground that he was not in a managerial position and suffered from autism, the fact that Darrell Read, Danny Wilkinson and Colin Goodman, Noel Cryan, Jim Gilmour and Terry Farr were found not guilty of LIBOR manipulation casts doubt over future successful prosecutions in benchmark rigging cases. Hamblen J directed the jury to convict the brokers if they had played a “significant” role in helping him rig LIBOR. Apparently they had not. The Court of Appeal’s refusal to grant Hayes permission to appeal to the Supreme Court may provide limited comfort to the SFO but the acquittal of the above brokers charged in the second “sham” LIBOR trial has reversed the momentum gained by the authorities. The brokers’ exoneration exposes the SFO to the accusation that it has been wildly swinging a sledgehammer to smash a nut. So, having tasted blood after Tom Hayes’s conviction, taking a gung-ho approach to weeding out the City’s “bad apples” seems to have backfired because the clever brokers had simply let Hayes believe whatever he wanted.

According to the brokers, the SFO “didn’t investigate it properly and didn’t listen”. Despite big increases to its funding, claims that the SFO’s director David Green QC has overseen a “string of successes” and that the extension of his contract for two years is a “boon” for justice are proving to be totally without merit. These days it is the SFO which is in the dock and Tom Hayes’s tormented father Nick Hayes used the opportunity to defend his son and said: “Today Tom Hayes stands tall. He refused to testify versus the LIBOR brokers and paid the price … I’m proud of him.” Of course, measured against such poor performance, the fact that the embattled agency wants a top-up of £21.5 million in emergency funds for “blockbuster” probes to bolster its dwindling fortunes amounts to expecting rewards for failure; it is completely unjustified.

SFO v Standard Bank: First UK Deferred Prosecution Agreement

The director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), David Green QC, has overseen a turnaround in the ailing agency’s fortunes. Green is reportedly paid £175,000 annually and the press suggests he is likely to continue his role for another two years after his four-year term expires in April 2016. With successes such as the conviction of benchmark fraudster Tom Hayes (presently jailed in Lowdham Grange Prison) already under his belt, Green has his sights set on securing further convictions in other ongoing benchmark prosecutions. In Hayes’s appeal, Sir John Thomas LCJ has directed that a medical report should be filed by 9 December 2015. Hayes argued the Nuremberg defence and said that he was merely following orders. But he failed miserably in winning the jury’s sympathy and is a broken man. He suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder but that did not stop Sir Jeremy Cooke from sentencing him to 14 years’ imprisonment for his fraudulent ways. Of course, only recently the SFO also secured the UK’s first deferred prosecution agreement (DPA). In SFO v Standard Bank Plc, the president of the Queen’s Bench Division, Sir Brain Leveson approved the UK’s first DPA in a bribery case connected to a £397/$600 million sovereign note deal involving Tanzania.

Two things stand out about this case. It is the first example of a UK prosecutor entering into a DPA or a “plea deal”. Moreover, the situation was equally novel because it was the very first time that the offence of failing to prevent bribery – under section 7 of the Bribery Act – was used since its introduction in 2010. The government considers DPAs as a new and important enforcement tool to deal with corporate economic crime. DPAs came into existence in the UK by virtue of section 45 and schedule 17 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. The present case turned on the Tanzanian government’s wish to raise funds by way of a sovereign note private placement. The bribe took place when, in March 2013, Standard Bank’s former sister firm Stanbic Bank Tanzania paid £4/$6 million to Enterprise Growth Market Advisers (EGMA). The SFO contended that the improper payment’s purpose was to induce a representative of the Tanzanian government to favour Standard Bank and Stanbic’s proposal for the sovereign note deal. Stanbic and Standard Bank shared the transaction fees of £5.6/$8.4 million that were generated by the placement.

Narratives of Misconduct: Emerging Trends in the Finance Sector

As seen on this blog, the spectre of misconduct hangs over the finance sector. Even after seven painful years of conduct related revelations, the fall out from the global financial crisis (GFC) continues to haunt consumers and banking institutions alike. To conceal the low-point in public confidence, empty rhetoric and hollow buzzwords such as “social licence” and “real markets” reign supreme while regulatory spin seeks to reconstruct the common person’s trust in the system. Equally, to make themselves palatable to the public, market pundits can be heard trumpeting the mantra of “inclusive capitalism”. Yet an overall lack of ethics permeates corporate culture and a continuing tendency to act in a twisted way can still be gleaned from events. If anything, the deficit in trust is increasing because resort to outright cheating can still be evinced in numerous instances. For example, along with Deutsche Bank, Barclays is in the spotlight yet again after paying £320 million in forex manipulation fines to the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) earlier this May; today, it has been fined £72 million by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for poor handling of financial crime risks. Equally, The Review into the failure of HBOS Group highlights the legacy of negligence in holding the finance sector to account. In addition to everyday outrage arising out of economic inequality, public anger in the finance sector has risen to a crescendo because the nadir of people’s sufferings has been reached. As the National Audit Office finds, state funds totalling £1,162 billion have been injected into the UK banking system to save it from collapse.

The paradox, of course, is that unlimited funds have been made available to rescue recklessly managed and overexposed banks – concerned less with integrity and more with ways to exploit token regulation – whereas the neediest in society are being shunned from basic necessities such as healthcare, care services, welfare and all the savage cuts that accompany the long-term goal of shrinking the state to 36% of GDP. Even to those who earnestly believe in the free market, official viewpoints and narratives often directly contradict reality. Most of all, officials fail to acknowledge wholesale abdication of duties owed to citizens and their attitude exposes a continuing tendency to overlook capitalism’s corruption. In the roundup below, among other things, further light is shed on developments trending in the bullring of financial misconduct and the theoretical jargon used by regulators is paired up with a cogent critique – by O’Brien, Gilligan, Roberts and McCormick – of the trickle down reforms enacted to positively anchor the finance sector to society’s needs.

EURIBOR Manipulation: SFO Charges First Individuals

George Osborne recently compared bad bankers to shoplifters and Mark Carney said that nobody at the Bank of England (BoE) “will be hugging a banker” – despite the crack down some “bad apples” remain. Two days later, on 13 November 2015, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) issued the first criminal proceedings against 10 individuals accused of manipulating the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (EURIBOR). Deutsche Bank employees Christian Bittar, Achim Kraemer, Andreas Hauschild, Joerg Vogt, Ardalan Gharagozlou, Kai-Uwe Kappauf and Barclays employees Colin Bermingham, Carlo Palombo, Philippe Moryoussef and Sisse Bohart have all been charged with conspiracy to defraud in connection with the SFO’s ongoing investigation – announced on 6 July 2012 – into the manipulation of EURIBOR, the daily reference rate, published by the European Banking Federation, based on the averaged interest rates at which Eurozone banks offer to lend unsecured funds to other banks in the interbank market, or euro wholesale money market. According to the SFO, criminal proceedings will be issued against other individuals in due course and the above defendants will make their first appearance at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 11 January 2016. On the other side of the Atlantic, in the first US LIBOR trial, on 5 November 2015 a New York jury found former Rabobank employees Anthony Allen (global head of liquidity and finance) and Anthony Conti (a senior trader) guilty of rigging LIBOR and the pair face lengthy jail sentences.

Unlike Tom Hayes and Nav Sarao, Allen and Conti waived extradition to fight charges of conspiracy and wire fraud in America and they maintain their innocence despite having “left a paper trail a mile long”. Both men are British citizens and American prosecutors are adamant that the guilty verdicts are founded on “rock solid evidence”. Rabobank paid £662 million in LIBOR penalties in 2013 of which the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) imposed £105 million. Both men were convicted in a district court in Manhattan on every count of conspiracy and wire fraud they faced and the outcome is a major triumph for American law enforcement officials in the US Department of Justice which brought charges against the Britons a year after the Dutch bank managed to achieve the $1 billion/£662 million compromise in October 2013 in relation to pending US and European probes.