US: EX-HSBC trader says boss ordered him to price fix

According to Bloomberg, a former HSBC Bank foreign currency exchange trader gave a detailed account on Wednesday, October 4, of the collusion between banks that antitrust prosecutors claim was used to rig currency markets, as the government’s case in the trial of former HSBC executive Mark Johnson nears its end.

Frank Cahill, a former forex trader for HSBC and Goldman Sachs & Co, took the witness stand and gave an inside look into a group of forex traders at banks including HSBC. Jurors at the fraud trial of Mark Johnson listened to a recorded phone call that prosecutors say is real-time talk from a front-running scheme run by Johnson and Stuart Scott, then HSBC’s head of foreign exchange cash trading in Europe. Johnson, who pleaded not guilty, faces charges of fraud and conspiracy.

“Ideally, you don’t ramp it above 30,” Scott told Cahill just before he began executing the trade on Dec. 7, 2011. Scott was sitting with him on the currency-trading desk in London while talking to Johnson by phone from New York, Cahill testified Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York.

Full Content: Bloomberg

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