Goldman ordered to pay $120M to settle manipulation charges
WASHINGTON — Goldman Sachs has been ordered to pay $120 million to settle federal regulators’ charges that it deliberately manipulated a global benchmark for interest-rate swaps to its advantage.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Wednesday that several Goldman traders, including the head of the bank’s Interest Rate Products Trading Group in the U.S., used trades and false reports to manipulate the benchmark between 2007 and 2012.
The CFTC cited emails and audio recordings in which Goldman traders “stated their manipulative goals in plain language.” The traders “even objected when their attempts to manipulate were not performed as inexpensively as possible,” the CFTC said.