On 26 March 2025, the General Court confirmed the Commission’s finding of a cartel by several banks relating to the trade in bonds issued by eurozone countries. The cartel occurred at the time of the financial crisis and subsequent euro-zone debt crisis (between 2007 and 2011) and affected both the issuance of such bonds by countries (primary market) and the subsequent trade of these bonds on the financial markets (secondary market).

The cartel involved various traders which used chat rooms to regularly exchange information, fix prices and allocate customers. After a detailed analysis of the various chatroom-entries relied on by the Commission, the General Court sided with the Commission’s conclusion that the banks were guilty of a cartel consisting of price fixing on both the primary and the secondary market, bid rigging on the primary market, and exchanges of commercially sensitive information regarding the secondary market.

Unsurprisingly, the General Court confirmed explicitly in this respect that the banks were responsible for the conduct of their employees. According to the General Court, an undertaking “cannot reasonably rely on any malfunctioning of its internal organisation” and cannot escape liability even if the cartel-conduct concerned “the act of a single employee who pursued a personal course of conduct initiated before he was recruited and that that course of conduct was only marginally successful.”

This case reconfirms the importance of having a proper compliance culture in place as each employee can trigger a company’s liability. Please refer to our recent In The Picture on the topic in this respect: https://lnkd.in/enD2m9mm

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