Two Former Rabobank Traders Convicted and Sentenced to Prison in U.S. Over Libor Rigging

14th March 2016

Two former traders at Rabobank Coöperatieve Centrale Raiffeisen-Boerenleenbank B.A., a Netherlands based bank (“Rabobank”), were sentenced to prison on March 10, 2016 by U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York, for the manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rates (“LIBOR”) for the U.S. Dollar and Japanese Yen.

Rabobank entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice back in October 2013, and agreed to pay a $325 million penalty to resolve violations arising from Rabobank’s LIBOR submissions.

LIBOR is the benchmark for short term interest rates for high-demand currencies around the world and is used to set hundreds of trillions of dollars in interest rate contracts, swaps, mortgages, student loans and credit cards, among other financial products. LIBOR is set daily based on submissions from 16 banks asked to estimate how much it would cost to borrow from each other for different periods and in different currencies.

Anthony Allen, Rabobank’s former global head of liquidity and finance in London, was sentenced to 24 months in prison.  Anthony Conti, a former senior trader on the bank’s money markets desk in London, was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison.  The defendants, both British citizens, were convicted by a federal jury on Nov. 5, 2015 after a four-week trial.  Allen was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud and 18 counts of wire fraud.  Conti was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud and eight counts of wire fraud.

The evidence against the defendants showed that they actively participated in a scheme to rig the U.S. Dollar and Japanese Yen LIBORs by submitting bogus rates to be used in calculating LIBOR in order to benefit their own trading positions and their colleagues’ trading positions.