A recent Law 360 story by Dean Seal, “Class Atty Seek $18.5M in Fees for Libor Deal with 7 Banks,” reports that counsel for a class of bondholders asked a New York federal judge for an $18.5 million fee award for having negotiated settlements with seven financial giants accused of rigging the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR).  Attorneys from Morris and Morris LLC Counselors At Law and Weinstein Kitchenoff & Asher LLC put the request before the court while seeking final approval for $68.6 million worth of settlements with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, RBS, Barclays, HSBC, UBS and Citibank.

According to the filings, class counsel has spent 34,743 hours representing the bondholders in their class action, which is part of sprawling multidistrict litigation launched over alleged rate-rigging coordinated by the world's largest financial institutions.  "Class counsel made this investment in vigorously litigating the bondholder action over more than eight years, with no assurance either of payment for their services or recoupment of their out-of-pocket litigation expenses," the bondholder attorneys said.

The bondholders' suit is one of many filed in connection with Barclays Bank PLC's 2012 admittance that it had been one of a number of banks lying about the interest rates it actually expected to pay in order to artificially influence Libor.  Investors contend the major financial institutions deliberately low-balled their submissions in the Libor rate-setting process to manipulate the benchmark.  As a result, the banks raked in hundreds of millions, and perhaps even billions, of dollars in ill-gotten gains, according to case filings.

Ellen Gelboim and Linda Zacher led the class of bondholders who owned U.S. dollar Libor-based debt securities between Aug. 1, 2007, and May 31, 2010.  Their highly complex antitrust action had already seen more than one dismissal, multiple appeals and even a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court by the time they announced settlements with Barclays, UBS AG and HSBC Bank PLC in 2017.

Under those deals, which received preliminary approval in July 2017, Barclays agreed to pay $7.1 million, UBS would contribute $17.9 million and HSBC would hand over $11.1 million.  Another deal that received preliminary approval in December 2018 stipulates that Citi will pay over $7 million to resolve bondholder claims.

Then last April, the bondholders announced three more settlements with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC that would recover a combined $25.5 million for the bondholder class.  The filings show that JPMorgan and BofA would each pay $6.25 million while RBS would turn over $13 million.  "Continuing to litigate against the settling defendants would likely last many years with the potential of no recovery for the bondholder class, and require the expenditure of significant resources of the court and the investment of hundreds if not thousands of hours of time and large sums of money," the bondholder class said.

Class counsel are asking for a 28% cut of the overall settlement fund net of roughly $2.5 million in expenses, resulting in a fee request of just over $18.5 million, along with another $817,237 in unreimbursed fees.  They noted that the settlements had been reached despite the fact that the bondholders' claims are currently dismissed and would rely on "an unpredictable appeal" to get reinstatement.