Canadian FX Civil Suit Follows US Settlement Track

Three banks settled a civil suit in Canada relating to the FX benchmarking scandal. UBS, BNP Paribas and Bank of America settled for a total of about 16 million Canadian dollars. In addition, as in the US case, the banks that settled early are hoping to be let off with relatively low payments in exchange for offering to provide information that will help in the investigation of other banks named in the suit. The settlements do appear on the low side relative to the first three settling banks in the US case (about 5% of those settlements) and the Canadian suit amount of $1 billion Canadian dollars. While we can expect remaining banks to pay higher settlements than these, of course they will be well below those in the US, which has a much larger FX market.