Katz’s sentencing adjourned until January

Sentencing for Jason Katz, the former Barclays currency trader who pleaded guilty to price fixing, has been postponed until January 7, 2019.

Katz has been charged with conspiring to eliminate competition in the Central and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and African currencies (Ceemea). He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

He is the first person to plead guilty to price-rigging and the third to be charged since the US Department of Justice began its investigation into foreign exchange markets misconduct, following a benchmark rates scandal in 2013.

The DoJ said Katz conspired with others to manipulate prices on an electronic trading platform from as early as January 2007 until at least July 2013, while working at three different banks during that time, in violation of the US Sherman Antitrust Act.

He was initially scheduled to be sentenced on January 5 at the Southern District Court of New York, but this was pushed back until July 5. The Federal Reserve Board has permanently banned him from working in the banking industry.

Katz joined Barclays in New York from Standard Bank in 2010. At Barclays, he was an emerging markets FX trader until September 2011, responsible for trading those currency pairs, including the dollar and the South African rand. He later worked at BNP Paribas’ New York office between 2011 and 2013, with similar currency pair responsibilities.

Katz’s admission to wrongdoing came after Barclays and other banks pleaded guilty in May 2015 to having had “unsafe and unsound” FX practices as a result of compliance and control failures. Barclays agreed to pay $342 million to settle the matter.

In July 2017, the Federal Reserve Board ordered BNP Paribas to pay $246 million to resolve an investigation of misconduct in its currency business, which took place between June 2007 and October 2013.

Thus far, the DoJ has successfully convicted and jailed one senior currency executive since the start of its investigation.

Mark Johnson, a former global head of FX cash trading at HSBC, was found guilty of front-running a $3.5 billion fixing order from one of the bank’s clients in December 2011. He has been sentenced to two years in prison, and was jailed for a few weeks before being released on a $1 million bond while an appeal case is pending in the Second Circuit Court of Appeal in New York.