But traders employed by banks submitting rates stood to win or lose millions based on the level of LIBOR.
Other exchanges involved emails in which traders remarked "always happy to help," "for you, anything," or "done … for you big boy," after submitting rates that were incorrect.
Almost all the banks in the LIBOR panels were submitting rates that may have been 30-40 basis points too low on average.
European authorities said the system did not require participating banks to have internal governance structures to manage potential conflicts of interest when submitting rates to Euribor.
This problem is starkest for EURIBOR, where individual banks have been submitting rates that are likely to be a good deal lower than the rates they would have to pay in actual transactions.
Barclays' behaviour threatened the integrity of the rates with the risk of serious harm to other market participants" The individuals at Barclays, known as submitters, who were responsible for setting the interest rates emailed responses to traders such as "always happy to help," "for you, anything," or "done … for you big boy," after submitting rates that were incorrect.
The City regulator said UBS had colluded with interdealer brokers to influence submissions to the yen Libor rate and that corrupt brokerage payments of £15,000 a quarter were made to reward brokers for their efforts to manipulate the Libor submissions of other banks on the panel submitting rates.
In fact, according to the FSA, the bank gave traders themselves responsibility for submitting rates to the British Bankers Associationn.
The deputy governor of the Bank of England, Paul Tucker, in testimony to the committee last week, said he had been concerned that Barclays was submitting rates that were high, but he had not intended that as an order to submit artificially low rates.
Senior Manager 1: NO WORRIES, I HAD TO WORK MY WAY OUT OF AN AMBASS HEADLOCK TO GET THOSE IN! Some of the exchanges cited by regulators indicate how commonplace and easy it was for traders to submit rate requests, like this October 2008 yen Libor exchange: Yen Desk Manager 1: Morning, mate, aright?
One site that will let you find new sites is Tappity.com, a user driven Web site that lets you submit, rate and even discover Web pages that are formatted for viewing on cellular phones and PDAs.
