Trader Sues Citigroup for $112 Million, Alleging Malicious Prosecution
Trader Sues Citigroup for $112 Million, Alleging Malicious Prosecution
(Bloomberg) -- One of three British traders acquitted of using an online chatroom to fix prices in the foreign exchange market is suing Citigroup Inc., claiming his former employer “fabricated” a baseless case against him to limit damage to the bank from a government antitrust investigation.
Rohan Ramchandani filed his suit Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan, seeking $112 million.
“Citi quite literally fabricated an antitrust case for the United States Department of Justice against Ramchandani based upon knowingly false allegations that he engaged in market ‘manipulation’ and ‘collusion,’” according to the complaint.
“Mr. Ramchandani’s claims of malicious prosecution are without merit and we will contest them vigorously,” Citigroup spokeswoman Danielle Romero-Apsilos said in an email.
A federal jury in New York last October rejected the U.S. case that Ramchandani, Richard Usher, a former JPMorgan foreign-exchange trader, and Chris Ashton, the ex-head of spot FX trading at Barclays, rigged the market from 2007 to 2013 by coordinating trades and manipulating prices on the spot market.
Citi, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays Plc and Royal Bank of Scotland Plc agreed in 2015 to plead guilty to felony charges of conspiring to manipulate the price of dollars and euros as part of a $5.8 billion settlement with the Justice Department. UBS Group AG pleaded guilty to a related charge.
Ramchandani claims in his suit that Citi fired him without cause in January 2014 and began leaking “false and gravely derogatory” claims about him to the press and to U.S. investigators. He said the Justice Department relied on the bank to identify Ramchandani as a market manipulator and to “decode” the technical communications underlying the government’s case against him.
Ramchandani claims Citi offered him up to the government to limit the consequences of the bank’s guilty plea and to insulate higher-ups from scrutiny. By limiting its exposure to the conduct of one employee, Citi was also seeking to reduce the amount it would be forced to pay in FX-related civil suits, he said.
“Citi had a strong motive to frame Ramchandani,” according to the complaint. “Self-interest.”
The three, known in electronic chat rooms as “the Cartel,” were charged in January 2017 after an investigation into conduct exposed by Bloomberg in 2013. The defendants, who were based in London, chose not to fight extradition to New York, where they faced a single charge of conspiracy to restrain trade. Ramchandani missed the birth of a child in England during the trial.
The defendants claimed they weren’t price fixers but were mostly interested in making money for themselves, even at the expense of others in the group. They said they used persistent electronic chats to joke and share market color. Jurors accepted the defense arguments that they weren’t doing anything different from other traders in the late 2000s and early 2010s, finding them not guilty after deliberating for half a day.
“It was a microscope that was placed on something that probably was happening all the time,” the foreman, Lucien Samaha, a 60-year-old New York artist, said after the verdict. “At the end, we found there was not enough evidence.”
The case is Ramchandani v. Citigroup Inc., 19-cv-9124, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
To contact the reporters on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net;Chris Dolmetsch in Federal Court in Manhattan at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
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