Two former traders at Deutsche Bank AG were convicted by a New York jury of conspiring to rig LIBOR, a key interest-rate benchmark, handing a victory to U.S. prosecutors targeting behavior by individuals at financial institutions that have paid billions of dollars to settle government claims.
Matthew Connolly and Gavin Black were found guilty on Wednesday of trying to manipulate the London interbank offered rate, which is used to value trillions of dollars of financial products, from 2004 to 2011.
Since regulators began a global crackdown on how the LIBOR benchmark is set, banks including Deutsche Bank and Barclays Bank have agreed to pay more than $9 billion in fines. Dozens of traders have been fined, barred from the financial industry or criminally charged in different countries. But only four, including Messrs. Connolly and Black, have been found guilty at a U.S. trial, and the other two convictions were reversed.
Deutsche Bank was one of the worst offenders in the global rate-rigging scandals. Authorities said bank employees played central roles in manipulating LIBOR and a similar European benchmark known as EURIBOR. Both are based on the average borrowing rate of big banks and are used to value trillions of dollars of financial products.
In 2015, Deutsche Bank was fined $2.5 billion — dwarfing settlements reached by other lenders — after British and U.S. regulators said the company intentionally misled investigators and then provided an "unacceptably slow and ineffective response" to requests for information.
Mr. Connolly supervised the money-market derivatives desk in New York, and Mr. Black traded derivatives in London.
