The German financial giant, Deutsche Bank has placed on leave its director of institutional FX sales earlier this month as part of an internal investigation into potential Exchange rate manipulation, according to a report by Reuters.
As Forex Magnates continues to report, investigations of FX rates’ manipulation are underway around the world and focus on chat groups in which institutional dealers sent instant messages over their Bloomberg terminals. For a period of three years, in chat groups with names such as ”The Cartel” and “The Bandits’ Club,” bank traders allegedly shared information with competitors allowing them to execute their own trades before filling client orders.
More and more traders have been suspended or fired from banks as the investigations extends and expands to new jurisdictions over time. Both the regulators of Hong Kong and New Zealand have announced today they are investigating the matter in their countries and yesterday the Swiss Competition Commission has initiated an investigation into eight major banks including UBS AG. On March 19th the Australian regulator, ASIC announced that it is also joining the FX probe.
Just last week the Swiss bank UBS suspended at least four FX traders based in three different continents. Kai Lew, the suspended Deutsche director is the first woman allegedly involved in the manipulation boys club.
According to her Linkedin profile, the London based Kai Lew has been at the position of Institutional FX Sales at Deutsche Bank since February 2006 and before that worked for six years at Goldman Sachs including at a position related to Fixed Income Derivatives sales. In November 2013 Goldman Sachs admitted the group is cooperating with the international FX rates manipulation investigations in its quarterly report.
