Jay L. Himes reacts to banks’ claim that recent Libor decision supports dismissal of gold and silver benchmark cases

The Bank of Nova Scotia and HSBC claim that the gold and silver benchmark cases should also be dismissed based on the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ “efficient enforcer” analysis in its recent dismissal of antirust claims in the Libor case.

Jay Himes, Co-Chair of Labaton Sucharow’s Antitrust and Competition Litigation Practice, which represents class plaintiffs in the gold case, told PaRR that defending a global price-fixing case involves “repeatedly throwing tacks in the road, which the courts then have to sweep up.”

Himes said, “the Libor defendants threw out a bunch of ‘plausibility’ and ‘antitrust injury’ tacks, and the Second Circuit swept them away.” But there are still efficient enforcer tacks on the road “at which the lower court paused, and which the Second Circuit therefore left temporarily in place to allow the district court to do its job. The clean-up will come, however,” he said.