Spain's High Court annulled all four competition-related fines imposed by the country's antitrust regulator, the Comisión Nacional de Mercados y la Competencia, on the kingdom's largest banks, in rulings made public on 11 January 2024. The court struck down penalties totalling approximately €91 million against CaixaBank, Banco Santander, BBVA, and Banco Sabadell.
The ruling applied to fines arising from alleged anti-competitive coordination among the four lenders — charges all four had contested throughout the legal process. The court's decision to annul each penalty in its entirety, rather than reduce them on proportionality grounds, rested on the court's finding that the CNMC had wrongly treated the conduct as a single, continuous infringement.
INDIVIDUAL FINES AND THE ANNULMENT
The CNMC had originally imposed fines of €31.8 million on CaixaBank, €23.9 million on Banco Santander, €19.8 million on BBVA, and €15.5 million on Banco Sabadell. The fines related to alleged collusion between 2006 and 2016 on the pricing of interest-rate derivatives sold with syndicated loans.
The court found that the banks had agreed the interest rate beforehand in the VAPAT operations, but that it was not shown that the derivatives in the other operations were priced above market conditions.