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Bloomberg
HSBC Holdings Plc won its court fight against a 33.6 million-euro ($37 million) European Union antitrust fine for conspiring with other banks to rig the Euribor benchmark, raising questions about whether the fines slapped on other institutions will hold on appeal.
While the judges at the EU’s General Court agreed that HSBC infringed competition, they annulled the fine for “insufficient reasoning.†The court said in a ruling on Tuesday in Luxembourg that the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, failed to provide a clear explanation for how it reached the amount of the penalty.
Despite the language of the court’s written verdict, the decision represents a victory for HSBC after it bet that fighting the fine and risking an even larger sanction would pay off, rather than joining a 824.6 million-euro settlement that four other banks including Deutsche Bank AG and Societe Generale SA agreed with the EU.
HSBC’s penalty was the smallest in the trio of lenders that refused to settle and were fined a total of 485.5 million euros by the EU in 2016.
The banks were penalised for breaking antitrust rules by colluding to manipulate the Euribor rate, which banks in Europe use for setting trillions of euros in lending for mortgages and other loans.
JPMorgan Chase & Co’s appeal of its much larger fine and Credit Agricole SA’s challenge are both still pending. Spokespeople for the banks declined to comment ahead of Tuesday’s decision.
The ruling is the latest in a series of court defeats for Margrethe Vestager, who’s about to start her second 5-year term as EU antitrust chief. The same court toppled a decision to order coffee giant Starbucks Corp to repay millions of euros of taxes to the Netherlands.
EU courts earlier this year overturned an order for Belgium to reclaim about 800 million euros from 35 companies, including Anheuser-Busch InBev.