A Singapore trader fired by Royal Bank of Scotland for allegedly manipulating the London interbank lending rate has dropped his lawsuit for wrongful dismissal.
RBS said on Wednesday that no payments were made to Tan Chi Min, the bank's former head of Asian delta trading, as part of the discontinuance of his action.
"The Plaintiff has discontinued his action in Suit No. 939 of 2011/X against the Defendant with each Party bearing his/its own legal costs. No payments were made to the Plaintiff as part of the discontinuance of his action," the bank said in an emailed statement.
Mr Tan - also known as Jimmy Tan - was dismissed in 2012 after regulators in the US, Europe, UK and Japan launched probes into whether rate-setting banks deliberately sought to skew Libor and other similar rates which are important reference points for trillions of dollars of financial products around the world.
He brought an employment claim alleging wrongful dismissal in the Singapore High Court and was seeking $1.5m in bonuses and 3.3m RBS shares he claimed he was owed.
In his original complaint - filed in 2011 - Mr Tan claimed that it was common practice and known to management that employees submitted requests for certain Libor rates to maximise their own profit, and that they also took requests from some clients.
RBS's defence denied these claims and said Mr Tan was guilty of gross misconduct. The bank's defence contended that "the plaintiff had sought to improperly influence the defendant's rate setters by communicating requests to have the defendant's submitted Libor rates set at particular levels in order to profit the plaintiff's book and/or the defendant and to maximise profit generally".
Suresh Nair, Mr Tan's lawyer at Straits Law Practice, a law firm in Singapore, said that RBS had "paid no money" to his client and that "both parties were satisfied with the outcome".
In February, RBS said it would pay $612m to settle US and UK investigations that it manipulated Libor, with one of the bank's Asian subsidiaries pleading guilty to a US criminal charge.
The bank, which is 81 per cent-owned by UK taxpayers, acknowledged that employees - including more than 21 traders and one manager - had tried to manipulate the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.
The admission came in documents published as part of the bank's settlement with the US Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the UK Financial Services Authority. The bank's RBS Securities Japan subsidiary pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of wire fraud filed by the DoJ. The subsidiary will pay $50m of the total fine, according to the DoJ.
Additional reporting by Jeremy Grant in Singapore
© The Financial Times Limited 2013. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation