3 banks fined €371m by EU over involvement in bonds trading cartel

European Union antitrust regulators fined UBS, UniCredit and Nomura 371 million euros on Thursday in connection with a European government bond trading cartel, reported Xinhua.

The European Commission said the European government bond cartel ran from 2007 to 2011, with traders from the banks informing each other on their prices and volumes offered in the run-up to the auctions as well as the prices being shown to their customers or to the market in general via multilateral chatrooms on Bloomberg terminals.

"It is unacceptable, that in the middle of the financial crisis, when many financial institutions had to be rescued by public funding, these investment banks colluded in this market at the expense of EU member states," Margrethe Vestager, the EU's antitrust chief, said in a statement.

"A well-functioning European government bonds market is paramount both for the eurozone member states issuing these bonds to generate liquidity and the investors buying and trading them," she added.

UBS was fined 172 million euros and Nomura will have to pay 129.6 million euros while UniCredit was fined 69 million euros.

The European Commission said Bank of America, RBS (now known as NatWest), Natixis and WestLB (now known as Portigon) also took part in the cartel.

NatWest was not fined as it alerted the EU about the cartel. Bank of America and Natixis were also not fined because they left the cartel more than five years before the Commission started its investigation.

It said Portigon, the legal and economic successor to WestLB, received a zero fine as it did not generate any net turnover in the last business year.