In re Credit Default Swaps Antitrust Litigation

In August 2013, Labaton Sucharow filed a class action on behalf of Essex Regional Retirement System against 12 of the world's largest financial institutions and certain key entities they controlled, alleging these companies fixed prices on credit default swaps (CDS) transactions and restrained the development of exchange-traded CDS platforms in the United States. The defendants are the major dealers in the CDS market. As a result of the defendants' collusive conduct, institutional investors who bought or sold CDS suffered from supracompetitive pricing.

Labaton Sucharow's complaint followed from ongoing investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission, which recently issued a statement of objections to nearly all of the same defendants regarding the same conduct as alleged by plaintiffs.

The cases were been consolidated and transferred to a single jurisdiction in the Southern District of New York. The Consolidated Amended Complaint was filed on January 31, 2014. On September 4, 2014, the court denied in part and granted in part defendant's motions to dismiss, leaving most of the plaintiffs' claims intact.

In April 2016, the $1.87 billion settlement to resolve the allegations was granted final approval. This settlement comes before any settlement with government regulators.