ZURICH Dec 19 (Reuters) – Swiss bank UBS was hit with a $1.5 billion bill and admitted to fraud on Wednesday in order to settle charges of manipulating global benchmark interest rates.
The penalty agreed with U.S., UK and Swiss regulators is more than three times the $450 million fine levied on Britain’s Barclays in June for rigging the Libor benchmark rate used to price financial contracts around the globe.
It is the second-largest fine paid by a bank and comes a week after Britain’s HSBC agreed to pay the biggest ever penalty – $1.92 billion – to settle a probe in the United States into laundering money for drug cartels.
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