LONDON – The Serious Fraud Office of Britain said on Tuesday that it had begun criminal proceedings against a former employee of the brokerage firm Tullett Prebon Group in connection with the manipulation of a global benchmark interest rate.
The prosecutor said that Noel Cryan, who worked at Tullett Prebon until last year, would face a charge of conspiracy to defraud in connection with its investigation into the manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.
The Serious Fraud Office said the conspiracy took place from February 2009 to December 2009.
Mr. Cryan is expected to appear in Westminster Magistrates’ Court next month.
A lawyer for Mr. Cryan did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment on Tuesday.
The agency, which prosecutes financial crime in Britain, did not provide additional details about the accusations.
Mr. Cryan is the 13th former employee of a bank or brokerage firm to face criminal charges in Britain related to manipulation of the Libor, one of the main rates used to determine the borrowing costs for trillions of dollars in loans. The authorities in the United States have separately brought criminal charges against several of the people charged in Britain.
The first criminal trial in the inquiry is expected to begin in Britain in May.
Tullett Prebon said on Tuesday that it was cooperating with regulators and other government agencies in their inquires.
Last year, Tullett Prebon said that it had been contacted by regulators and other government agencies in Britain in connection with their inquires into the rate manipulations and was “cooperating fully with these requests.”
Mr. Cryan was terminated by the firm last year and has sued the company over his dismissal.
Since it first emerged publicly in 2012, the Libor scandal has engulfed some of the world’s largest banks and tarnished the reputations of many of Britain’s leading lenders.
To set Libor and other rates, banks submit the rates at which they would be prepared to lend money to one another, on an unsecured basis, in various currencies and at varying maturities. Investigations in the last two years have found evidence that traders at various banks benefited from falsely reported rates.
The resulting scandal has also set off a call for reform in how other benchmarks are set, including the rates for currencies and precious metals.
British prosecutors and the Serious Fraud Office have said they have identified as many as 22 people as potential co-conspirators in the investigation, but they have named only the 13 people charged criminally.
Rules in Britain severely restrict what can be said publicly about a defendant or their purported actions ahead of criminal trials.
Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Lloyds Banking Group, UBS, ICAP and the Dutch lender Rabobank have paid a total of more than $3 billion in fines to the British and American authorities related to investigations into the manipulation of various Libor-linked interest rates.
Antitrust regulators in the European Union also separately agreed last year to settle with eight financial institutions over charges of collusion to manipulate Libor related to the Japanese yen and the euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor. Six of the institutions, including Deutsche Bank, agreed to pay a combined 1.7 billion euros, or about $2.1 billion, in penalties.
Last week, the European Commission fined JPMorgan Chase €61.7 million for manipulating the Swiss franc-Libor benchmark interest rate in what it called an “illegal bilateral cartel” with the Royal Bank of Scotland, which avoided a fine after it revealed the existence of the cartel to the commission.