AMSTERDAM (CN) — The European Union’s General Court confirmed on Wednesday that Credit Suisse was guilty of colluding with rivals in a private forex chatroom, but slashed the European Commission’s €83 million ($90.5 million) fine to just under €29 million ($31.6 million) after finding key errors in its calculation .
The ruling is the latest in years of litigation over a 2021 decision by the European Commission, which found traders at Credit Suisse and four other major banks — UBS, Barclays, HSBC and RBS — used a chatroom called “Sterling Lads” to exchange confidential information about their G10 currency trades. While the others settled, Credit Suisse fought the charges and faced separate proceedings.
The commission had concluded that Credit Suisse took part in exchanges of “current or forward-looking commercially sensitive information about their trading activities” between February and July 2012. That kind of coordination, it said, amounted to an illegal agreement or cooperation that was part of a broader, ongoing effort to manipulate competition across the European Economic Area.
The court agreed. The messages weren’t vague or generic. They were specific, current and not publicly available. That, the judges said, gave other traders an unfair edge.
In one exchange, a trader said he had orders to sell a small amount of Great British pounds to U.S. dollars at the fixing. In another, someone shared that he’d just handled a big euros to pounds deal for a “usual geezer who does the rounds.”
According to the judgment, these messages were “revealing an exchange of precise, current and confidential information” that was “capable of removing some of the uncertainties inherent in the foreign exchange spot trading market.” That kind of insight, the court said, could make it easier to read the market and tweak trading strategies on the fly.
The court also dismissed Credit Suisse’s claim that the conversations were harmless, concluding that the nature and context of the exchanges were enough to breach antitrust rules.
While the court upheld the finding that Credit Suisse broke antitrust rules, it took issue with how the commission came up with the penalty.
Since foreign exchange spot trading doesn’t generate traditional sales revenue, the commission used an alternative method to estimate how much business the bank had done. But the court said the regulators hadn’t followed their own fining guidelines and relied on data that was less complete and reliable than what Credit Suisse had already provided.
That error led the court to cut the fine to €28.9 million ($31.6 million). The judges said “the commission failed to use the best available figures” and pointed out that getting the numbers wrong can undermine the fairness of the whole penalty.
The infringement at issue focused exclusively on voice trading of G10 currencies — a group that includes the euro, U.S. dollar, British pound, Swiss franc and others.
According to the commission, traders at several major banks exchanged real-time details about bid-ask spreads, customer orders and their own risk positions. Some messages even pointed to occasional coordination, such as backing off to avoid getting in the way of each other’s trades. The commission found that this conduct went beyond mere exchanges of information and amounted to a restriction of competition.
But when it came to Credit Suisse, the commission stopped short of saying the bank took part in that kind of coordination. It also didn’t accuse the bank of joining in any broader agreement among traders. The fine was based solely on the exchange of sensitive information and did not go beyond that.
The court backed that view, finding that sharing confidential trading information can restrict competition even without a formal agreement or explicit intent. What mattered, the court noted, was that the information helped traders anticipate one another’s moves — undermining the competitive tension markets rely on.
Credit Suisse tried to poke holes in both the facts and the legal theory behind the case. Its lawyers argued that the commission had misunderstood trader lingo, taken chatroom messages out of context and failed to prove the bank gained anything from the conversations.
The court wasn’t convinced. It said the point wasn’t whether Credit Suisse made a profit, but whether the shared information had the potential to tilt the playing field. In the judges’ view, the exchanges were commercially sensitive and could have influenced how competitors behaved, even if no one could show a direct payoff.
UBS Group AG, which took over Credit Suisse in 2023, joined the case as a co-applicant, along with UBS AG and Credit Suisse Securities (Europe) Ltd. But the ruling deals only with Credit Suisse’s actions and doesn’t change the settlements reached with the other banks.
Eleanor Fox, a leading antitrust scholar and professor emerita at New York University School of Law, said the case reflects deeper enforcement challenges in today’s financial markets.
“Even what counts as an illegal collaboration is more ambiguous now,” she said. “The question is whether traders ‘agreed to’ the exchange rate or even a range for the exchange rate. But what’s enough evidence to prove that? The line is blurred.”
Fox said that while due process must be respected, authorities need sharper tools to keep up.
“There may be global conspiracies, but there’s no global law,” she said. “This does not mean that due process rights of defendants should be lightened — they should not. But both jurists and policy-makers must be alert to these problems and work to ensure that the law is strong enough to prevent the ‘stealth’ cartelization of the world.”
UBS and Credit Suisse declined to comment.
Both sides now have two months and ten days to bring an appeal to the European Court of Justice. That appeal can only address points of law, not the facts of the case.
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