Manipulating international commodity benchmarks such as Brent crude oil would be a criminal offence, punishable by jail, under a set of reforms the EU Commission has proposed in response to the rigging of a major interest reference rate.
The Commission, the EU’s executive arm, announced on Wednesday plans to tighten supervision of financial benchmarks after a scandal involving interbank lending rate Libor, used to set prices for trillions of dollars of financial products.