Washington: It’s $1bn in payouts that JPMorgan Chase & Co most likely wants to forget.
In agreements with regulators totalling $1bn and made public on Thursday, the nation’s biggest bank settled four civil investigations into its “London Whale” trading scandal and two more into the wrongful billing of credit-card customers.
The deals, which involve five authorities from the United States and one from the UK, are a milestone in the company’s push to clean up its legal affairs but leave JPMorgan exposed to additional costs and embarrassment.
The bank still faces criminal probes into the trading scandal, its conduct during an energy trading investigation, sales of mortgage securities in the United States and possible bribery in China. Investigators are also looking into its role in setting benchmark interest rates known as Libor.
The settlements include $920m of penalties for JPMorgan’s London Whale trading scandal, which Chief Executive Jamie Dimon at first dismissed as a “tempest in a teapot” and ultimately resulted in $6.2bn in losses. The deals included an admission of wrongdoing, which has been rare in past settlements made by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Reuters
