Banks Sued on Claims of Fixing Price of Gold

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/banks-sued-on-claims-of-fixing-price-of-gold/?_r=2

According to one of the suits, “The ‘great flaw’ of the gold fixing process is that the member banks trade on the information exchanged during the call to manipulate the price of gold and gold derivatives before publication of the gold fix to the wider market.”

Each of the banks — Barclays, Scotiabank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Société Générale — denied, or declined to comment, on the accusations of collusion, which — at least traditionally — have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, concerns that the gold fix may be rigged have escalated of late in part because of investigations into the setting of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and suspicions about manipulation of global foreign exchange rates.

“A lot of conspiracy theories have turned out to be conspiracy fact,” said Kevin Maher, a former gold trader from New York, who filed the first suit against the banks. (The case is Maher v. Bank of Nova Scotia, 14-cv-01459.) “We now know that Libor was manipulated and that a bad odor is coming out of the Forex market. So why not gold?”

Mr. Maher, who started trading gold in 1993, said he filed his suit reluctantly and only after he became convinced that official regulators were unwilling or unable to investigate the fix. “I didn’t feel like there was any oversight, either from the government or from self-regulating entities,” he said in an interview last month. “A lawsuit seemed to be the only means to rectify the problem.”