Citigroup One Guilty Plea From Being Allowed To Spend Several Billion Dollars To Make Rategate Go Away

Ready for the prison yard.

Back in November, Citigroup and all of the other bad kids in the back of the foreign-exchange rate-setting classroom (in other words, all of them) promised to mend their ways (and pay a collective $3.3 billion). A month later, Mike Corbat said that the $2.7 billion legal charge the bank took in the fourth quarter should more or less cover the whole ugly mess and allow him to “largely put those [issues] behind” him. Which may or may not be true, financially-speaking, once the small matter of Citi pleading guilty to criminal charges is taken care of.

Citigroup Inc said it could plead guilty to an antitrust charge to resolve a U.S. Department of Justice investigation of its dealings in foreign exchange markets.

In a regulatory filing on Monday, the company also said the Justice Department had advised that it did not intend to prosecute the bank in a separate investigation into the setting of interest rates between banks.

Citigroup says could plead guilty to settle forex probe [Reuters]
Citigroup Says Could Plead Guilty in DOJ’s Forex Investigation [WSJ]
Banks Expected to Settle FX Probes for Billions [WSJ]