Bank of New York Mellon asked a Florida court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by state Attorney General Pam Bondi that accuses the bank of profiting from foreign-exchange trades at the expense of the state retirement fund.
The state's complaint should be thrown out because the bank never promised to trade currencies the way the attorney general described, BNY Mellon said in a Monday filing in Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee.
“The contract does not contain any promise to buy and sell foreign currencies to and from the fund at ‘actual cost' or at the rates that BNY Mellon itself obtained on the interbank market,” the bank said in the filing.
BNY Mellon is fighting several lawsuits over how it conducts foreign-exchange transactions on behalf of public pension funds.
Ms. Bondi claims the bank caused the $121.6 billion Florida Retirement System, Tallahassee, to pay more than it should have for currency purchases and receive less than it should have for sales. BNY Mellon overcharged the fund by millions of dollars, Ms. Bondi said in a statement in August.
