Ex-Citi Trader Wins Employment Case But Won’t Get Job Back

(Bloomberg) -- A former Citigroup Inc. trader, acquitted of rigging foreign-exchange markets, won a U.K. employment lawsuit against the bank but won’t get his job back.

Rohan Ramchandani won an unfair-dismissal claim against the bank in a ruling last month, according to court records. But the former trader’s request to be re-hired was withdrawn and the court said any monetary awards would be reduced because of his conduct.

Citigroup fired Ramchandani in early 2014 as regulators probed whether traders at the world’s largest banks colluded through instant-message groups to manipulate benchmarks such as the WM/Reuters rates. Ramchandani was part of a message-group known as “The Cartel” that was a focus of the investigation.

The employment lawsuit was restarted after a federal jury in New York rejected U.S. charges that Ramchandani and two other senior traders at Barclays Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. rigged the market from 2007 to 2013 by coordinating trades and manipulating prices on the spot exchange rate for euros and U.S. dollars.

The London court ruled that although the bank hadn’t followed its own disciplinary process, the contents of the “Cartel” chats would have eventually justified his firing, court records show.

The ruling, which the Financial Times reported earlier Monday, was dated July 14 and released on the court website on July 30.

‘Narrow Issue’

Citigroup said in a statement that the court’s ruling on the narrow issue of unfair dismissal wasn’t a surprise because it had admitted that it hadn’t followed its usual procedures during the termination process.

“Citi welcomes that the tribunal recognized Ramchandani’s conduct led to his termination, and did not order his return to Citi employment,” the bank said in a statement.

Ramchandani said that the court found that Citigroup had acted unreasonably. He also pointed out that judge called for increasing his compensation by 25%. But that “uplift” would take place after the complicated ruling reduced the award by 75%, to reflect his own conduct.

“The tribunal also accepted my genuine belief that my chats were not improper,” Ramchandani said in a statement.

Under U.K. law, most employment awards are capped at around 80,000 pounds ($105,000) without a showing of discrimination. That’s less than the 100,000 pounds a month that Ramchandani made in his old role as head of the bank’s EMEA G10 Spot FX trading.

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