Private litigation over alleged manipulation of the London InterBank Offered Rate has been on very shaky ground since last March, when a federal judge in New York gutted a series of consolidated antitrust cases over the benchmark interest rate. But a different group of plaintiffs got some welcome news on Friday, when an appeals court revived part of a securities class action targeting Barclays plc for its role in the Libor mess.
In a 22-page decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reinstated claims that Barclays duped investors about the value of its American Depository Shares, which tumbled amid revelations that the bank misrepresented its financial health and borrowing costs through inaccurate Libor submissions. Plaintiffs lawyers at Robins Geller Rudman & Dowd and Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz brought the case in July 2012, one month after Barclays admitted to submitting false Libor rates in a $467 million settlement with U.S. and U.K. authorities.
