On June 5, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed CFTC orders denying a foreign exchange trader’s application for a whistleblower award related to five successful enforcement actions against banks whose traders manipulated benchmark rates in the foreign currency exchange market, with monetary penalties totaling $1.475 billion. The court held that the trader did not meet the necessary criteria to be paid a whistleblower award: the enforcement actions were not based on conduct about which the trader provided specific, credible and timely information, and the record did not show he was the original source of information on which the CFTC relied.
The trader alleged that his 2011 communications to regulators about suspected foreign exchange market manipulation and his later formal tip qualified him for an award, but the court found that his information led only to an investigation focused on retail spot transactions that closed with no action and that none of the information he provided was used by the benchmark investigation team. The court also rejected the trader’s derivative-source argument, finding no evidence that he was a source for the news article that triggered the CFTC’s benchmark investigation, and held that a separate argument based on later articles was forfeited because the trader’s claim based on those later articles was used differently before the CFTC and the court, and so the court did not need to address it.
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