Libor: UBS '$1bn fine'

American and British regulators are set to ramp up action against banks accused of manipulating the benchmark Libor interest rate by slapping what is expected to be a $1bn fine on UBS.

The Swiss bank is likely to be hit with what would be the biggest penalty in the international probe as early as next week, according to reports last night. The figure would dwarf the around $470m stumped up by Barclays in the summer as the FSA and its transatlantic counterparts probed claims that more than a dozen institutions used altered submissions to sway Libor, which is used to determine the price of trillions of dollars worth of financial contracts.