After almost a decade and untold millions of dollars in legal fees, some of Wall Street’s biggest banks will finally get their day in court on allegations of price-fixing in the municipal bond market — that is if they don’t settle first.
Bank of America, Barclays Capital Inc., BMO Financial Corp., William Blair & Co. LLC, Citigroup Inc., Fifth Third Bancorp, JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley are expected to go to trial in Illinois next month to face allegations they inflated interest rates on bonds to finance public works to discourage investors from returning them for cash and colluded in setting the rates.
It is the first of four such cases originally filed under seal in 2014 by a Minnesota financial adviser, B.J. Rosenberg, saying that the banks caused a collective $1.5 billion in damages and seeking restitution for triple that amount. Another $6.5 billion in damages hangs in the balance in antitrust litigation in New York.
Read more: Mystery Man Behind $3.6 Billion in Muni Lawsuits Steps Forward
A dozen banks are defendants across the four lawsuits which also span California, New York and New Jersey. The lawsuits allege that from 2008 until relatively recently the banks — acting as remarketing agents for long-term bonds with periodic rate adjustments, called variable-rate demand obligations or VRDOs — failed to get issuers the lowest possible interest rates on securities where rates were typically reset on a daily or weekly basis to discourage investors...
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