Forex executive held in New York by FBI

NEW YORK: A senior manager at HSBC Holdings Plc has been arrested in New York in a case related to US investigations into the foreign exchange currency markets, a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Mark Johnson, HSBC’s global head of foreign exchange cash trading in London, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at John F Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday and is expected to appear in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, on Wednesday afternoon, the person said.

He is expected to be charged along with Stuart Scott, the former head of HSBC’s Europe desk, for trading ahead of a client purchase of $3.4 billion worth British Sterling, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source. Johnson did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for HSBC declined to comment. A spokesman for the Justice Department had no immediate comment.

The case followed a US Justice Department investigation into foreign-exchange rigging at global banks that led four of them to plead guilty to conspiring to manipulate prices for currencies in the foreign exchange market.

HSBC was not part of those criminal cases, but in November 2014 agreed to pay $618 million to resolve related probes by US and British regulators.

The charges were announced a day after the Federal Reserve Board said it was banning Matthew Gardiner, a former FX trader at Barclays PLC and at UBS AG, from participating in the banking industry for manipulating pricing benchmarks.