UBS, Nomura Holdings fined $452 million as EU cracks down on bond cartel

UBS says impact could be $100 mn on quarter; may appeal

UBS Group AG and Nomura Holdings and UniCredit SpA were fined a total of 371 million euros ($452 million) by the European Union for colluding on euro government bond trading during the region’s sovereign debt crisis.

UBS was fined 172 million euros and Nomura will have to pay 129.6 million euros for a traders’ cartel that swapped commercially sensitive information from 2007 to 2011 when eurozone bond yields soared. UniCredit was fined 69 million euros. It was “unacceptable, that in the middle of the financial crisis, when many financial institutions had to be rescued by public funding these investment banks colluded