COLLUSION CLAIMS
HILARY JOFFE: Risky returns of cashing in on bank crisis
If you are one of those with a tendency to conspiracy theorising, you can’t help wondering about the timing of the Competition Commission’s decision to prosecute 18 international and local banks for collusion in foreign currency trading. The prosecution relates to alleged collusion and price-fixing by a group of the banks’ traders in the offshore rand-dollar market between 2007 and 2015, much of which has already been probed by the US department of justice with the international banks, some of which have already paid fines for wrongdoing. But it’s a little hard for conspiracy theorists to see it as coincidence that the commission’s investigation, which began in 2015, suddenly reaches fruition not long after the public protector revived a report into the decades-old Absa/Bankorp "lifeboat" saga and just as the attack on SA’s banks and "white monopoly capital" gets loud and savage.Of course, no one is questioning the commission’s independence or integrity and it would surely not refer...
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