concluded<\/a> a four-year administrative investigation into secondary market bond trading. The antitrust regulator imposed combined fines totaling MX$35.075 million (US$2.061 million) against seven commercial banks \u2014 Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Santander, Banamex, Bank of America, BBVA, and J.P. Morgan \u2014 as well as 11 individual traders for engaging in absolute monopolistic practices in the sovereign debt market.<\/p>\nCOFECE’s investigation established that traders at the defendant institutions entered into 142 illegal agreements between 2010 and 2013 to manipulate secondary market prices for peso-denominated government securities. Using institutional electronic chatrooms on commercial platforms such as Bloomberg and Reuters, traders exchanged non-public order information to coordinate bid-ask quotes, agree to abstain from buying or selling specific paper, and artificially inflate prices offered to institutional buyers, including pension fund administrators (Afores). COFECE calculated that these collusive practices generated direct market damage of MX$29.39 million (US$1.726 million), harming public finances and reducing investment yields for national savings mechanisms.<\/p>\n
Because the anticompetitive conduct occurred between 2010 and 2013, COFECE calculated penalties under the former Federal Economic Competition Law of 1992, which imposed lower statutory fine caps than Mexico’s current competition framework. Under the 2021 resolution, Deutsche Bank and Barclays received the highest individual sanctions at MX$8.7 million (US$511,171) and MX$6.45 million (US$378,972), respectively, while J.P. Morgan received the lowest penalty at MX$378,505 (US$22,239). COFECE noted that while statutory fines were constrained by historical legislation, the ruling established critical administrative precedent by penalizing cartel behavior within Mexico’s primary financial intermediation channels.<\/p>\n
Following the administrative ruling, several of the sanctioned financial institutions challenged COFECE’s findings in Mexican federal courts, initiating a multi-year judicial review of the evidence. The litigation culminated in a May 2025 decision by the Second Chamber of Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice, which affirmed that electronic chatroom logs generated on commercial trading platforms during business operations do not possess constitutional privacy protections.<\/p>\n
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