FSA Deserves Blame for Missing Libor Rigging

The U.K.’s financial regulator is partly to blame for not detecting efforts by banks it supervised to rig benchmark interest rates for several years, UK lawmaker Andrew Tyrie said.

Bloomberg reports that The Financial Services Authority didn’t identify or deal with weak compliance at Barclays before it and U.S. authorities fined the bank $443m for rigging the London interbank offered rate and similar benchmarks, the Treasury Select Committee led by Tyrie said in a report released Thursday.

'The systemic rigging of important rates appears to have been pervasive in the banking industry over a long period of time', Tyrie said in a statement on the findings. 'Serious regulatory shortcomings also came to light. It is only right that the FSA has had to shoulder its share of the blame for this scandal'.

In the meantime, Reuters reports that The Financial Services Authority will publish its internal review into when it first knew about banks rigging the Libor benchmark within weeks, before the watchdog is scrapped.

The watchdog told parliament's Treasury Select Committee in a written submission released to the media that the review was being conducted by its internal audit division.

FSA Deserves Blame for Missing Libor Rigging, Tyrie Says

FSA to publish internal Libor probe soon