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Deutsche Bank to pay over USD10m to settle two CFTC cases

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Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay over USD10 million to settle two Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) enforcement matters.In the first matter, Deutsche Bank resolved federal court charges stemming from alleged violations of various swap data reporting and other regulatory violations. In the second matter, the CFTC issued an administrative order against Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. (DBSI), filing and settling charges that two of DBSI’s traders engaged in spoofing. According to the order, DBSI manually placed bids or offers on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) with the intent to cancel those bids or offers before execution, an illegal practice known as spoofing.

“This case reaffirms the importance of proper reporting among registered swap dealers,” says CFTC Director of Enforcement James McDonald. “The Commission has been charged with monitoring and addressing systemic risks in our swaps markets. We can’t fulfill these obligations if we don’t have accurate reporting of the swaps dealing activity of our registrants.”

The consent order imposes a USD9 million civil monetary penalty on Deutsche Bank. According to the consent order, the parties acknowledge that the penalty represents a substantial reduction based on Deutsche Bank’s cooperation with CFTC staff, which included consenting to a court-appointed monitor upon the filing of the action.

The consent order also requires Deutsche Bank to comply with the prior CFTC order and prohibits Deutsche Bank from committing future violations of the sections of the Commodity Exchange Act and Commission regulations that Deutsche Bank was found to have violated.

The consent order stems from a complaint filed in August 2016, after an unprecedented swap reporting platform outage at Deutsche Bank that began on April 16, 2016. For the next five days, Deutsche Bank was unable to report any swap data for multiple asset classes. [See CFTC Press Release No. 7430-16]  According to the consent order, Deutsche Bank’s efforts to end the system outage exacerbated existing reporting problems and led to the creation of new reporting problems, many of which violated the 2015 order.

Given the breadth of the failures regarding Deutsche Bank’s swap data reporting, supervision, and disaster recovery plan, the CFTC requested, and Deutsche Bank consented to, the appointment of a monitor to facilitate its compliance with its swap data reporting obligations. The consent order finds that over more than two years of the litigation monitorship, the monitor made—and Deutsche Bank implemented—numerous recommendations to remediate issues with Deutsche Bank’s swap data reporting, supervision, and disaster recovery plan.

The Division of Enforcement staff members responsible for this action are Amanda Burks, Philip Tumminio, Kara Mucha, James H Holl, III, Erica Bodin, and Rick Glaser. Thomas Guerin of the Division of Market Oversight as well as Robert Stowsky and Kate Mitchel of the Office of Data and Technology also assisted with this matter.

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