Currency rigging case judgment reserved

South Africa's Constitutional Court has reserved judgment in the Competition Commission’s decade-long fight to prosecute local and international banks for the rand/us dollar manipulation. The Sunday Tribune reports that the appeal application was brought by the commission against the majority of the findings made by the Competition Appeal Court (CAC) last year. This included that the commission did not have jurisdiction over the majority of the international banks. The arguments, which dealt with the Competition Act, ended a day earlier than expected. Standard Bank accused the commission of ‘sticking to its bloody-minded ignorance’ by continuing to accuse it of allegedly being part of a cartel which manipulated the rand/US dollar exchange. The commission hit back, saying the bank had pulled out all the stops in a bid not to face the music. The commission had referred the case regarding the alleged rand fixing against 28 local and foreign banks to the Competition Tribunal in June 2020. The banks were ordered by the tribunal in March 2023 to file their answering affidavits in response to the commission’s complaint referral, but objected to the tribunal order and appealed it to the CAC. The CAC released 17 banks from the complaint referral before they answered the allegations against them and restricted the commission’s case to only a handful of banks.