LONDON - Three former brokers at the British financial firm ICAP appeared in court on Tuesday on charges that they conspired to manipulate a global benchmark interest rate.
Danny Martin Wilkinson, Darrell Paul Read and Colin John Goodman are the latest individuals to be charged in a wide-ranging investigation into potential manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.
At a brief hearing in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, the men only spoke to confirm their identities.
Mr. Wilkinson, who lives in New Zealand, will be required to post bail of 40,000 pounds, or about $66,776, and will be allowed to travel between Britain and New Zealand. The other two were not required to post a security, but were ordered to surrender their passports.
According to the Serious Fraud Office, which brought the charges, the conspiracy to defraud took place from August 2006 to September 2010.
Libor is one of the main rates used to determine the borrowing costs for trillions of dollars in loans, including many adjustable-rate mortgages in the United States.
Some of the world’s largest banks, including Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS, have been caught up in the scandal, and have agreed to pay billions of dollars to settle accusations with regulators in Britain, the United States and elsewhere.
Nine people in total are facing criminal charges in Britain, including three former employees of Barclays who were charged in February.
Tom Hayes, a former derivatives trader at UBS and Citigroup, was the first person to be charged criminally in Britain in the scandal last year. He has pleaded not guilty and also faces criminal charges in the United States.
Prosecutors said they were considering whether to link the case against Mr. Hayes with the cases against Mr. Wilkinson, Mr. Reed and two former traders at the brokerage firm RP Martin.
The earliest trial date would be late next year.
Defendants in all three cases are expected back in court on April 30.
British prosecutors have said they have identified 22 people as potential co-conspirators in the investigation.
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 and in various currencies and varying maturities. Investigations in the last two years have found evidence that traders at the various banks benefited from falsely reported rates.
Barclays, R.B.S., UBS, the Dutch lender Rabobank and ICAP have combined to pay more than $3 billion in fines to British and American authorities in the Libor investigation.
In December, antitrust regulators in the European Union also agreed to settle with eight financial institutions over claims 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 $2.35 billion.
