He warned regulators in 2011 - two years before the scandal hit the headlines.
On June 5, a federal appeals court told an early currency-market tipster he gets no share of a $1.475 billion bank settlement.
The ruling is a clean lesson for anyone in compliance weighing whether to report what they see. Whistleblower awards are narrower than they look. Speaking up early does not earn one. Being generally right does not either. The tip has to drive the case the regulator actually brings.
Trevor Kitchen traded foreign currencies for years. From 2008 to 2011 he used a platform run by Oanda Corporation, trading the dollar, the pound and the euro against the Swiss franc thousands of times. In August 2011 he watched those currencies drop sharply against the franc and decided it had to be collusion among market makers. He emailed regulators, including the CFTC, with a complaint centered on Oanda and what he described as market abuse and manipulation. His theory was that the platform and others were driving down the pound and the dollar using the Swiss franc.
CFTC staff reviewed his Oanda account records, found nothing to back the claims, and closed that inquiry with no action.
Almost two years later, in June 2013, Bloomberg reported that traders at several large banks were said to be rigging the WM/Reuters rates, the benchmark figures used to value currency trades. The CFTC says that report is what pushed it to open a benchmark manipulation investigation into five banks. Those...
NeoGenomics Laboratories Inc. (NeoGenomics), located in Florida, has agreed to pay $9,813,260 to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by providing below fair market value cons...