Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), on Friday, said it has launched a probe into the Barclays Bank which is at the centre of an interest rate fixing scandal.
The move comes after Barclays chairman Marcus Agius and chief executive Bob Diamond had resigned following regulators in the U.K. and the U.S. slapping a 290 million pound penalty on the bank for trying to rig Libor and Euribor, the key interest rates at which banks lend to each other.
The Libor and Euribor are the basis for trillions of pounds of financial transactions.
SFO, which is described as an independent government department that investigates and prosecutes serious or complex fraud, and corruption, said in a one-line statement that its director, David Green, had “decided formally to accept the Libor matter for investigation.”
