Friday, July 20, 2012

Liborgate: Investigation Reveals A VIP Rate-Rigging Club



 It's tres, tres exclusive, according to New York Magazine.

Libor-gate has been a big deal for a few weeks now, but it hasn't quite broken the mainstream-interest threshold. One issue is that, as hard as Jon Stewart has tried, it's hard to get people riled up about a scandal involving interest rates. But the bigger problem is that investigators aren't naming names. Who, we all wondered, were the members of this shadowy group?  Thanks to an enterprising bit of digging by the FT yesterday, we now have some names to accompany our collective outrage.

Philippe Moryoussef, a former Barclays trader, was reportedly the "former Barclays senior Euro swaps trader" who conspired with traders at several other banks to rig Barclays submissions to Libor and Euribor — which is the same thing but for the Eurozone.,,,,,

But  Moryoussef — who left his new job at Nomura over his involvement in the scandal — didn't work alone. According to the FT, his circle included "external traders" such as Michael Zrihen at Crédit Agricole, Didier Sander at HSBC, Christian Bittar at Deutsche Bank, and an as-yet-unnamed group of traders at Société Générale.

Together, this VIP club of rate-riggers — let's call them the Li-bros — are said to have worked together to submit false Euribor rates, which would allow them to squeeze a few extra dollars out of their futures trading positions. They may also have been among the "external traders" who famously celebrated pulling off a successful rig like…..

Read more at http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/libor-scandal-gets-personal.html

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