US accuses 16 banks of Libor fraud; No common ground on Crimea vote; China online giants prepare for US listings

1 US accuses 16 banks of Libor fraud (BBC) A US regulator has sued 16 banks for allegedly manipulating the London interbank offered rate (Libor). The Libor rate is used to set trillions of dollars of financial contracts, including mortgages and financial transactions around the world. The regulator said the manipulation caused substantial losses to 38 US banks which were shut down during and after the 2008 financial crisis.

The sued banks include Barclays, HSBC, Citigroup and Royal Bank of Scotland. The British Bankers' Association (BBA) has also been sued by the regulator - the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The FDIC alleged that the banks mentioned in its lawsuit rigged the rate from August 2007 to at least mid-2011.

Other banks named in the lawsuit include Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Bank, Credit Suisse, UBS, and Rabobank. Libor is the average rate at which banks lend money to one another and is decided on a daily basis. Most of the world's biggest banks contribute estimates to form the Libor. Over the past two years, regulators across the globe have been investigating the manipulation of the rate and there have been $3.7bn in fines to date.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26584942

2 No common ground on Crimea vote (San Francisco Chronicle) The West braced Friday for a vote by the Crimean Peninsula to secede from Ukraine — and likely be annexed by Russia — as the last attempt for diplomacy broke down despite threats of costly international sanctions and other imminent penalties against Moscow for forcibly challenging a pro-European government in Kiev.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said the vote's results are all but a foregone conclusion, and urged Russia's parliament against accepting any offer to claim Crimea as its own. "We believe that a decision to move forward by Russia to ratify that vote officially within the Duma would, in fact, be a backdoor annexation of Crimea," Kerry said after six hours of talks Friday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Lavrov said Russia would respect the results of the Crimea vote but would not predict what would happen next.

"We lack a common vision of the situation, and differences remain," Lavrov said of his Ukraine negotiations with Kerry. However, he said Moscow has no plans to invade southeast regions in Ukraine. Thousands of Russian troops amassed on Ukraine's eastern border this week, including large artillery exercises involving 8,500 soldiers in the Rostov region alone.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/politics/article/US-West-brace-for-Crimea-vote-to-leave-Ukraine-5316695.php

3 China online giants prepare for US listings (Michael J de la Merced in The New York Times) The Chinese Internet industry is coming of age, as some of its biggest players prepare to start new chapters as publicly traded companies — in the US. The biggest of them all, the e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group, is aiming to file for an initial public offering in New York as soon as next month. Several analysts value Alibaba at north of $130 billion, and many predict that its IPO may raise more than the $16 billion that Facebook fetched in its market debut nearly two years ago.

And Weibo, a major Chinese microblogging company seen as that country’s answer to Twitter, filed on Friday for its own stock sale. Should the two companies move forward with their plans, they could form the second wave of Chinese Internet IPOs, nearly a decade after Tencent and the search engine Baidu went public. Earlier this year, JD.com, Alibaba’s principal rival in the e-commerce market in China, filed for its own stock offering in the US.

Unlike a wave of Chinese companies that sought American stock listings several years ago — some of which have since collapsed in the face of accounting scandals — these are Goliaths. Largely unchallenged by foreign competitors, the Chinese companies have come to dominate what is seen as the next frontier of the Internet. E-commerce has become especially important, as Chinese consumers increasingly flock to online marketplaces rather than traditional physical retailers.

Despite being confined mainly to Chinese-speaking users, Weibo has become one of the most talked-about social networks in the world. The company claimed 129.1 million monthly active users as of year-end, compared with Twitter’s 241 million. But by far the most anticipated offering on Wall Street is Alibaba’s. Virtually every major investment bank has journeyed to Hong Kong to make its pitch to Alibaba’s management team. 

Founded in 1999 as a marketplace for businesses to trade goods like circuit breakers and hydraulic cylinders with other companies, Alibaba has become a behemoth that is part eBay, part Google and part PayPal. Its sales volume in 2012, $160 billion, was nearly twice that of Amazon.com, according to RetailNet Group.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/alibaba-aims-for-an-i-p-o-in-new-york/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0