Latest On LIBOR - UBS, Lloyds, Fidelity

The British Bankers' Association was given weekly warnings in 2008 that the process of setting the Libor interest rates was being distorted.

BBC News reports that a former member of the Libor compilation team at Thomson Reuters says it regularly warned senior BBA staff about the problem.

Its reports regularly highlighted the implausible rate submissions of several banks involved in the Libor process.

The BBA denied these had amounted to warnings of wrong-doing.

Each day the six-man team at Thomson Reuters would calculate the various Libor interest rates, based on estimates submitted by staff from a panel of banks about how much it would cost them to borrow in the financial markets, in various currencies and for various durations.

The highest and lowest estimates were discarded as outliers and the average rate derived from the remaining ones, and then published.

The warning reports from the Libor team were passed to John Ewan, the BBA's head of Libor, who now works for Thomson Reuters.

Hit the link below to access the complete BBC News article:

BBA 'warned weekly' about Libor says former rate-compiler

In the meantime, Oswald Gruebel, the former head of UBS, doubts whether traders at global banks acted with criminal intent to manipulate benchmark interest rates and accuses regulators of ignoring warning signs.

Gruebel was at the helm of the bank last year when UBS said it had secured leniency from some justice authorities in exchange for its cooperation in probes into some aspects of setting Libor rates.

'I think that if interest-rate traders had acted with criminal intent, they would have hardly recorded it in emails. Traders are accused of many things, but they aren't that short-sighted', Gruebel said in a Reuters interview.

The news agency also reports that Lloyds Banking Group has said some parts of its business had received subpoenas from governments under an investigation into a global interest rate rigging scandal.

Finally, Bloomberg reports that BlackRock, Fidelity Investments and Vanguard Group Inc., firms that collectively manage more than $7 trillion, are gauging how their clients have been hurt by Libor manipulation and whether to take legal action as at least a dozen banks are being investigated for rate-rigging.

The money managers can take cues from Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW) and the city of Baltimore, which in lawsuits predating the record fine levied on London-based Barclays (BARC) Plc last month, sued lenders for artificially suppressing Libor. Schwab alleged last year that returns on money funds and short-term debt strategies were depressed by the banks’ actions, while Baltimore’s lawsuit against Barclays and other banks stems from lower returns on interest-rate swaps.