Barclays trader fired amid foreign exchange probe

Bloomberg

A Barclays Plc trader fired amid a global probe into foreign-exchange market manipulation lost his lawsuit against the bank after a judge ruled the lender was right to dismiss him for revealing confidential information to rivals and using sexually explicit, racist language in online chats.
Barclays suspended Jack Murray in October 2013, shortly after regulators began probing banks suspected of manipulating the global-currencies market. During that investigation, the lender discovered Murray shared bank secrets with rivals, including trading positions, strategies, stop-loss orders, spreads and customer orders, according to a December judgment released by the court Thursday.
Murray worked for Chris Ashton, a member of the “Cartel” instant-messaging group that was at the center of regulatory probes into the rigging of foreign-exchange benchmarks. Global banks have paid about $10 billion to resolve investigations related to the issue.
Almost a dozen FX traders and sales people have sued their former employers in the past two years, claiming they were made scapegoats by banks rushing to appease regulators amid the scandal. Murray is the third Barclays trader to lose an employment suit, following Ashton and another trader, Mark Clark.
A Barclays spokesman declined to comment. A call and email to Murray’s lawyer weren’t immediately returned. The bank’s internal probe had cleared Murray of attempting to manipulate currency benchmarks.
The release of the ruling by the court was likely delayed amid a transition to a new electronic database of employment tribunal decisions.
Murray’s conduct “in terms of exchanging confidential trading information with competitors and the inappropriate and highly sexually explicit language were all extremely serious and it was reasonable” for the bank to conclude they amounted to gross misconduct, the judge said in the ruling.
In the judgment, the judge said Murray disclosed a client nickname in a chatroom with Ashton and another member of the Cartel, Richard Usher, who at the time was working for JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Murray “agreed the nickname would probably have been widely known inside the bank and did not know for sure whether anyone outside the bank would recognize the nickname, but would speculate that this was the case,” the judge said. As Usher “was in the chatroom it is likely that the nickname was used because he would understand who was being referred to.”
During the trial in July, Murray blushed in the witness stand as he was urged to explain to the courtroom sexual and racist slang he’d used in chat rooms on the Bloomberg terminal’s instant messaging service — language that he said was common among traders. It was referred to as “pub speak” in the ruling.
“I was following those around me,” he said while giving evidence. “I never at any point thought I was doing anything wrong.”
The ruling is one of the last in a spate of lawsuits brought by employees in the wake of the foreign-exchange scandal. David Madaras, a former Citigroup Inc. trader, is awaiting his ruling.
Unlike Barclays, which won all three lawsuits initiated by former FX traders, other banks, including Royal Bank of Scotland Plc and Citigroup have had mixed success. One RBS trader and several from Citigroup won their suits, because the banks were too hasty to dismiss staff as a result of regulatory scrutiny.
Still, the courts declined to award substantial sums. In most cases, the judges found the firings were justified, and the lenders would have won should they have taken more time to follow proper procedures.