A U.S. District Court judge in New York on Thursday dismissed a consolidated class-action lawsuit alleging 10 banks engaged in conspiracies to suppress competition in the U.S. Treasury securities market.
Judge Paul G. Gardephe reaffirmed in a court filing his decision a year earlier to grant defendants' motion to dismiss the lawsuit because the 18 plaintiffs in an amended complaint filed since the original dismissal failed to provide additional evidence to support their conspiracy allegations.
The original lawsuit was filed in 2015 and alleged the banks engaged in a bid-rigging conspiracy by sharing confidential information and coordinating how to bid at Treasuries auctions from at least 2007 to 2015, and also alleged that the banks since at least 2013 had boycotted any electronic trading platform on which all market participants could execute trades.
In his March 31, 2021 dismissal, Mr. Gardephe gave plaintiffs the opportunity to file an amended complaint and in his decision Thursday said the newly-introduced evidence was not enough to prove the banks engaged in any collusion.
The 10 banks are Bank of America, Barclays Bank, BNP Paribas Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Credit Suisse Securities, Goldman Sachs Group, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley RBS Securities and UBS Securities.
The first lawsuit was filed in July 2015 by the $6.8 billion Boston Retirement System after the U.S. Department of Justice opened a probe examining the U.S. Treasuries market, and eventually led to a consolidated filing that included a total of 18 plaintiffs. A full list of the plaintiffs was not immediately available.
Timothy J. Smyth, executive officer at Boston Retirement System, could not be immediately reached for comment.
