South Africa's Major Banks Win Decade-Long Currency Case; Competition Commission Loses

South Africa’s Constitutional Court has cleared the country’s major banks from prosecution in a currency manipulation case that consumed regulatory and legal capital for more than a decade. The ruling is a decisive defeat for the Competition Commission, which had pursued 28 banks on allegations of coordinated rand-dollar trading designed to inflate their profits at the expense of the broader economy.

The court’s majority judgment, authored by Justice Owen Rogers, rejected the commission’s appeals against most of the defendant banks. Three of South Africa’s largest lenders, Standard Bank, Nedbank and First Rand Bank, will face no further legal action. The commission’s case against Bank of America Europe Designated Activity Company, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, Nomura, Commerzbank, Macquarie, HSBC Bank USA NA, Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith Incorporated, and Bank of America NA also collapsed.

The commission did secure a partial victory. It retains the ability to prosecute four multinational institutions: BNP Paribas, JPMorgan Chase Bank, HSBC Bank and Standard Americas Incorporated. The court also upheld Credit Suisse Securities’ successful appeal to be removed from the case entirely.

The Competition Commission launched this legal battle in 2017 after investigations uncovered evidence that local and international banks had allegedly colluded to coordinate rand-dollar trading. That evidence included references to an instant messaging chat room dubbed “ZAR Domination,” where traders allegedly coordinated their activities. On those findings, the commission recommended fines of up to 10 percent of each bank’s South African revenue, a figure that would have represented a significant financial penalty across institutions of this scale.

The prosecution faced sustained resistance from the outset. Foreign banks challenged the commission’s jurisdiction to prosecute them, while South African lenders argued the regulator lacked sufficient evidence to proceed. Both defenses ultimately prevailed in the Constitutional Court.

The commission’s legal representative, advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, had argued during the appeal that the banks’ conduct “weakened the rand” and continued to harm the country’s imports and exports of dollar-denominated products, which the commission valued at approximately two trillion dollars. Despite that framing of the case’s broader economic consequences, the court found the commission’s case rested on incorrect factual assumptions and lacked the evidentiary foundation necessary to justify further proceedings against the South African banks.

Standard Bank, the country’s largest lender by assets, welcomed the outcome. The bank said it was pleased that the judgment “affirms the consistent position maintained by the bank since the inception of this matter in 2017 and throughout these proceedings, that neither Standard Bank nor any of its employees was involved in a conspiracy to manipulate the rand.” The bank added that it “conducts its business with integrity and in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations” and committed to continuing to support South Africa’s financial markets and economic growth.

By contrast, the Competition Commission now exits a decade-long prosecution with its scope sharply narrowed, its legal investment largely unreturned, and its authority over foreign financial institutions still contested. The outcome clears the domestic banking sector of the most serious allegations while leaving open the question of whether the four remaining multinational defendants, BNP Paribas, JPMorgan Chase Bank, HSBC Bank and Standard Americas Incorporated, will mount equally effective jurisdictional challenges before proceedings advance further.