Nedbank’s legal representative, Senior Counsel Anthony Gotz has argued the Competition Commission has failed to connect the bank to the Bloomberg chatroom activities linked to the manipulation of the rand.

The bank’s legal representative says it is merely implicated based on a Reuters trading platform that is noted as sharing similarities with the chatroom in question.

Presenting arguments at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, Gortz emphasised the quotes posted by Nedbank on the Reuters public platform were much too sporadic to constitute collusive behaviour.

“What we see is (that) the case against Nedbank is based on sporadic allegations of cryptic market conduct that the commission has effectively thumb-sucked based on a set of trading data. The record itself does not say a particular bank is withholding quotes. The commission does not put Nedbank in any of the chatrooms. It does not allege there was any contact, communication, agreeing, concertation and sharing of information between Nedbank and any of the other respondents,” says Gortz.

Competition Commission approaches ConCourt over bank price-fixing: