The LIBOR antitrust lawsuit ended in September 2025 with a defense win: after 15 years of litigation, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted summary judgment to all 16 defendant banks, ruling that investors could not prove a coordinated conspiracy to suppress the London Interbank Offered Rate had harmed them. Before that ruling, several banks had settled with two plaintiff classes for a combined total in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The banks that chose to fight ultimately prevailed.
What the Case Was About
LIBOR was a benchmark interest rate calculated each business day from estimates submitted by a panel of major banks about what it would cost them to borrow from one another. The British Bankers’ Association trimmed the outliers and published an average. That average then set the reference rate for adjustable-rate mortgages, student loans, corporate debt, interest-rate swaps, and exchange-traded futures like Eurodollar contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, touching hundreds of trillions of dollars in financial contracts.
Because submissions were estimates rather than records of actual trades, banks could shade them. During the 2007–2009 financial crisis, regulators found that some had, sometimes coordinating with each other to project financial health or to help their trading desks. Private lawsuits followed. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated them in 2011 as MDL No. 2262, In re LIBOR-Based Financial Instruments Antitrust Litigation, before Judge Buchwald. At its peak the consolidated proceeding covered roughly 50 individual cases and multiple putative class actions.
Who Sued and Who Was Sued
Plaintiffs organized into three tracks:
- Over-the-counter (OTC) plaintiffs — investors, municipalities, and pension funds that held interest-rate swaps, floating-rate notes, and other instruments tied directly to LIBOR.
- Exchange-based plaintiffs — traders who bought or sold Eurodollar futures and options between January 2003 and May 2011.
- Bondholder plaintiffs — holders of LIBOR-linked bonds issued by third parties, who said they received lower interest payments because of suppressed rates.
The defendants were the members of the USD LIBOR panel, including Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds Banking Group, Rabobank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Société Générale, UBS, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, the Norinchukin Bank, and the Royal Bank of Canada, among others.
The 2013 Ruling That Reshaped Everything
The first major decision came on March 29, 2013, and it defined the rest of the case. Judge Buchwald dismissed the federal antitrust claims with prejudice, holding that plaintiffs had not alleged an “antitrust injury” because the LIBOR-setting process was never meant to be competitive in the first place. Submitting rate estimates to a shared index, she wrote, was a “cooperative endeavor,” not a marketplace. Any harm from coordinated false submissions was misrepresentation, not a restraint on competition.
She also dismissed the plaintiffs’ RICO claims. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act barred basing racketeering claims on conduct actionable as securities fraud, and the alleged RICO enterprise was based in England, which triggered the presumption against extraterritorial application of U.S. law.
Some claims survived. The exchange-based plaintiffs were allowed to press commodities-manipulation claims under the Commodity Exchange Act, though the court held that claims tied to contracts entered before May 29, 2008, were time-barred because early 2008 press coverage had put investors on inquiry notice of possible manipulation.
The Bondholders’ Trip to the Supreme Court
The bondholder plaintiffs had raised only an antitrust claim, so the 2013 dismissal ended their case entirely. They tried to appeal, but the Second Circuit refused to hear them, saying the order had not disposed of all claims in the broader MDL.
They took that procedural question to the Supreme Court. In Gelboim v. Bank of America Corp., decided January 21, 2015, the Court unanimously reversed. Cases consolidated for MDL pretrial proceedings, the justices held, keep their separate identities; because the Gelboim complaint contained only one claim and that claim was gone, the dismissal was a final, appealable decision.
The procedural victory did not save the substantive case. On remand, the Second Circuit affirmed the dismissal, and a later district court ruling found that the bondholders were not “efficient enforcers” of the antitrust laws, because the third-party issuers who chose to reference LIBOR in their bonds broke the chain of causation between the banks’ submissions and any injury to bondholders.
What the Settling Banks Paid
While the merits fights ground on, several defendants settled with the two surviving classes.
Exchange-Based Class
Seven banks settled with the Eurodollar futures class for a combined $187 million: Deutsche Bank paid $80 million, Citigroup $33.4 million, Barclays roughly $20 million, HSBC $18.5 million, Bank of America $15 million, JPMorgan $15 million, and Société Générale about $5.1 million. The court granted final approval in September 2020 and authorized distribution in October 2023, with A.B. Data, Ltd. administering the claims. A later settlement of $3.45 million covered the remaining defendants, including Credit Suisse, Lloyds, NatWest, and UBS, bringing the exchange-based total above $190 million.
OTC Class
The OTC track produced larger individual numbers. By 2018, Deutsche Bank had agreed to pay $240 million, the largest single OTC settlement, which also required the bank to cooperate with the plaintiffs’ ongoing litigation against the other defendants. Citigroup settled for $130 million, Barclays for $120 million, and HSBC for $100 million. Additional banks settled in later years. One plaintiffs’ firm put the aggregate OTC total at at least $590 million; another source tracked it at $781 million by the time the remaining defendants won summary judgment.
The Second Circuit and Personal Jurisdiction
The case reached the Second Circuit four times. One of the more consequential rulings came on December 30, 2021, addressing personal jurisdiction over foreign banks. Judge Buchwald had dismissed several claims against foreign-based defendants for lack of jurisdiction, but the Second Circuit reversed, holding that plaintiffs could establish jurisdiction based on a defendant’s participation in a conspiracy operating in the United States. The banks sought Supreme Court review, but that petition did not produce a reversal.
The September 2025 Summary Judgment
On September 25, 2025, Judge Buchwald issued a 273-page opinion granting summary judgment to the entire 16-bank defense group on all remaining antitrust and state-law claims.
Her reasoning rested on three findings. She called the plaintiffs’ theory of a coordinated, multi-year, 16-bank conspiracy to suppress LIBOR “economically senseless.” She concluded that plaintiffs had failed to produce enough evidence to create a triable question of fact about whether such a conspiracy existed. And she granted the defendants’ Daubert motions to exclude the plaintiffs’ expert models purporting to show LIBOR suppression, finding that the analyses relied on unreliable and incomplete data, failed to account for non-conspiratorial causes of rate movements during the global financial crisis, and drew conclusions their methodologies could not support. Without those models, plaintiffs could not show LIBOR was actually lower than it would have been absent any conspiracy, and so could not prove injury.
A separate Second Circuit decision on October 1, 2025, affirmed the dismissal of a related lawsuit, Sonterra Capital Master Fund Ltd. v. UBS AG, filed in 2015. A unanimous panel found the Sonterra plaintiffs had not identified specific transactions where manipulation caused financial harm under either the Sherman Act or the Commodity Exchange Act.
The MDL docket was terminated on October 29, 2025. No appeal of the summary judgment ruling appears in the court record.
Regulatory Fines and Criminal Cases Are Separate
The civil MDL is often confused with the parallel regulatory and criminal enforcement that ran alongside it, and the numbers are very different. Global regulatory fines for LIBOR, Euribor, and related benchmark abuses exceeded $9 billion. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission alone imposed more than $4.1 billion in penalties. Barclays was first to settle with the CFTC, paying $200 million in June 2012. UBS paid the CFTC $700 million in December 2012, plus $500 million to the Department of Justice and £160 million to the UK’s Financial Services Authority. Deutsche Bank’s 2015 resolution included $800 million to the CFTC, $775 million to the DOJ, £226.8 million to the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, and $600 million to the New York Department of Financial Services. The Royal Bank of Scotland paid the CFTC $325 million in 2013, and Rabobank paid $475 million that same year.
On the criminal side, the Department of Justice charged 16 individuals, and more than 100 bank employees were fired or suspended. Deutsche Bank’s London subsidiary pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2015, and UBS pleaded guilty to additional LIBOR-related charges that year as part of a broader $5 billion settlement covering multiple benchmarks. Former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to 14 years. Three Barclays traders were convicted in 2016 with sentences between two and six years. Six of Hayes’s alleged co-conspirators were acquitted in January 2016. All American LIBOR convictions were overturned in 2022, and on July 23, 2025, the UK Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Hayes and EURIBOR trader Carlo Palombo, with the Serious Fraud Office confirming it would not seek retrials.
None of that enforcement money flowed to the private plaintiffs in the MDL. The regulatory penalties went to governments, and the criminal cases produced prison sentences and guilty pleas, not damages for investors. What the MDL plaintiffs recovered came from the class settlements described above, and only from the banks that chose to settle rather than litigate to the end.