US and UK regulators could hit the Royal Bank of Scotland with as much as $804 million in fines next week to settle allegations traders tried to rig interest rates, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Investment banking chief John Hourican and Peter Nielsen, the head of markets, may also be asked to leave because they had responsibility for the parts of the company where the alleged wrongdoing occurred.
The fine would be the second-largest levied by regulators in their investigation into allegations traders at the world’s biggest lenders manipulated submissions used to set the London interbank offered rate. UBS AG, Switzerland’s biggest lender, was fined $1.5 billion in December for rate-rigging, exceeding the 290 million pounds Barclays paid in June.
The rate-rigging allegations are the biggest blow to Chief Executive Officer Stephen Hester’s attempt to overhaul the Edinburgh-based lender after it took the largest bank bailout in history in 2008.
Officials at RBS, the UK Financial Services Authority and the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department declined to comment.
Nielsen didn’t respond to an e-mail and Hourican didn’t reply to a request for comment.