A view of the logo of Swiss bank Credit Suisse in Zurich, Switzerland, 21 February 2022. (Photo: EPA-EFE/ENNIO LEANZA) Christopher Hatton, who left Credit Suisse earlier this year, testified on Wednesday in a trial over a lawsuit by a group of investors claiming the bank rigged the foreign exchange market. He said he didn’t believe anything he’d posted was a violation of the bank’s policies at the time.
Hatton said he needed to speak to traders at other banks because there was no reliable source of pricing information about the Asian currencies he was trading.
“There was an electronic platform that didn’t reflect the exact quote you were making so I had to use my judgement,” Hatton testified under questioning by lawyers for Credit Suisse. “My own position was based on what the market was doing at the time, which kind of customer, the orders we had coming in on our books. There were a lot of factors.”
According to Hatton, Credit Suisse traders used various chats to speak with customers, to communicate internally and to talk to employees at other banks to help inform their negotiations.
“The chats I had with other banks might be for market colour, what our views were, things of that nature,” Hatton said. “We would get views. Try to get a reality check on where the market was at any particular time. We dealt with very volatile currencies so we wanted to get a handle on the market.”
Other traders at Credit Suisse dealt mostly with other currencies, so Hatton said he chatted with traders who he knew from his 20-plus years dealing in Asian currencies as the bank attempted to build a business in that market.
“There was no central marketplace for the currencies we were trading,” Hatton said. “I had to put a proper price on amounts that I couldn’t get out of right away. I would have to hold that position for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, even longer depending on the time of the day.”
Hatton said that examples of salty language in the chats shown to jurors – such as him referring to the group as a “den of thieves” – was simply jocular banter between a group of friends as well as expressions of frustration with customers who tried to play the banks against each other to their own benefit.
“There are certain customers that you just don’t want to do business with,” Hatton said. “Certain customers would have a tendency to deal with multiple banks at the same time, creating a push in the market where a deal that you did would go against you very fast and you would lose money.”
The investors allege Credit Suisse and 15 other banks participated in online chat rooms in which they colluded on spreads for currency pairs from late 2007 through 2013.
Credit Suisse is the only one of the banks to go to trial, which kicked off Tuesday following jury selection. The other banks, including Citigroup, UBS Group AG, Barclays Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, HSBC Holdings Plc and Deutsche Bank AG, agreed to pay $2.3-billion to settle claims against them in 2017. BM/DM