Barclays has been fined $3.75 million by FINRA for “losing” over a decade of incriminating chat messages regarding Libor manipulation.
A $3.75 million wrist slap for erasing any incriminating evidence of criminal fraud sounds like a pretty good deal to us, as we suspect that the firm’s “loss” of 10 years worth of instant messaging data likely kills any serious hopes of prosecution for LIBOR manipulation fraud.
As Reuters reports: <
Barclays Plc has been fined $3.75 million by a U.S. regulator over its alleged decade-long failure to properly keep electronic records, emails and instant messages. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority on Thursday said that from 2002 to April 2012, Barclays failed to preserve order data, trade confirmations, account records and other information in a format that prevented their alteration or erasure, known as “Write-Once, Read-Many” or “WORM.”
Email attachments were reportedly “lost” as well from May 2007-2010:
It also said Barclays failed to properly retain attachments to some Bloomberg emails from May 2007 to May 2010, and failed to properly retain about 3.3 million Bloomberg instant messages from October 2008 to May 2010. FINRA said that once Barclays’ system encountered an attachment to an instant message that it had processed earlier on a given day, it would stop accepting instant messages for that day.
We are perplexed however why FINRA hasn’t asked the NSA to view a copy of the Master Back-up chat and email files.