Every morning, from his desk by the bathroom at the far end
of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s trading floor overlooking London’s
Liverpool Street station, Paul White punched a series of numbers into
his computer.
White, who had joined RBS in 1984, was one of the
employees responsible for the firm’s submissions for the London
interbank offered rate, or Libor, the global benchmark for more than
$300 trillion of contracts from mortgages and student loans to
interest-rate swaps. Behind him sat Neil Danziger, a derivatives trader
who had worked at the bank since 2002.
On the morning of March 27,
2008, Tan Chi Min, Danziger’s boss in Tokyo, told him to make sure the
next day’s submission in yen would increase, Bloomberg Markets magazine
will report in its March issue. “We need to bump it way up high, highest
among all if possible,” Tan, who was known by colleagues as Jimmy,
wrote in an instant message to Danziger, according to a transcript made
public by a Singapore court and reported on by Bloomberg before being
sealed by a judge at RBS’s request.
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