The Lloyds Banking Group agreed yesterday to pay more than $380 million to British and U.S. authorities to resolve investigations into the manipulation of rates, including one used to determine fees paid by Lloyds for taxpayer-backed funding during the financial crisis, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. The British lender is the latest big bank to admit criminal wrongdoing by its employees in trying to manipulate the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and other global benchmark interest rates. Yet Lloyds — partly owned by the British government as a result of a bailout during the financial crisis — added its own variation to the rate-rigging scandals. The bank will also pay an additional 7.76 million British pounds, or about $13.2 million, to compensate the Bank of England for the manipulation of another benchmark rate, which was used to determine fees paid under an emergency funding program for financial institutions during the financial crisis.
