Forex traders at four multinational banks — Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays PLC and Royal Bank of Scotland plc — formed “The Cartel” and conspired to manipulate the prices of the U.S. dollar and the euro, the U.S. Department of Justice said today.

All four banks have been charged criminally in an investigation that began when Eric Holder was Attorney General, said Loretta Lynch, Holder’s successor.

UBS AG, a fifth multinational, has been charged criminally with manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and other benchmark interest rates, the Justice Department said. The UBS prosecution came about after the agency ripped up an earlier nonprosecution agreement (NPA) with bank, alleging that UBS had violated the terms of a pact reached in December 2012 to resolve the LIBOR matter.

Barclays also breached an NPA struck in June 2012 over the LIBOR matter and has agreed to pay an additional $60 million, the Justice Department said.

The charges, all felonies, include conspiring to fix prices and rig bids. They are filed against Citicorp, Barclays, JPMorgan and RBS.

A felony charge of wire fraud was filed against UBS, the Justice Department said.

“In other words,” Lynch said, according to her prepared remarks released by the Justice Department, “UBS promised, in other resolutions, not to commit additional crimes — but it did.”

As for Citicorp, Barclays, JPMorgan and RBS, Lynch said, “Starting as early as December 2007, currency traders at several multinational banks formed a group dubbed ‘The Cartel.’ It is perhaps fitting that those traders chose that name, as it aptly describes the brazenly illegal behavior they were engaged in on a near-daily basis. For more than five years, traders in ‘The Cartel’ used a private electronic chatroom to manipulate the spot market’s exchange rate between euros and dollars using coded language to conceal their collusion.”

All five of the banks have agreed to plead guilty to the criminal charges at the “parent level,” the Justice Department said.

Here, according to the Justice Department, are the market-manipulation timelines and the agreed-to criminal fines:

• Citicorp, involved from as early as December 2007 until at least January 2013, $925 million.
• Barclays, involved from as early as December 2007 until July 2011, and then from December 2011 until August 2012, $650 million.
• JPMorgan, involved from at least as early as July 2010 until January 2013, $550 million.
• RBS, involved from at least as early as December 2007 until at least April 2010, $395 million.
• UBS (for NPA breach that occurred after December 2012), $203 million.

A statement by the Justice Department includes the type of language the agency normally directs at street criminals when it is trying to send a message. In this instance, however, the language is directed at the banks. From the statement (italics added):

Citicorp, Barclays, JPMorgan, RBS and UBS have each agreed to a three-year period of corporate probation, which, if approved by the court, will be overseen by the court and require regular reporting to authorities as well as cessation of all criminal activity.  All five banks will continue cooperating with the government’s ongoing criminal investigations, and no plea agreement prevents the department from prosecuting culpable individuals for related misconduct.  Citicorp, Barclays, JPMorgan and RBS have agreed to send disclosure notices to all of their customers and counter-parties that may have been affected by the sales and trading practices described in the plea agreements.

Today, in connection with its FX investigation, the Federal Reserve also announced that it was imposing on the five banks fines of over $1.6 billion; and Barclays settled related claims with the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for an additional combined penalty of approximately $1.3 billion.  In conjunction with previously announced settlements with regulatory agencies in the United States and abroad, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), today’s resolutions bring the total fines and penalties paid by these five banks for their conduct in the FX spot market to nearly $9 billion. 

Holder, Lynch said, “oversaw this investigation from its inception.

“His relentless work made this resolution possible, and I want to thank him for his commitment to this important effort,” she said.

Lynch replaced Holder last month.