FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German authorities have turned down a bid to extradite four citizens to Britain to face charges of conspiracy to rig Euribor benchmark interest rates while at Deutsche Bank (DE:DBKGn).
Justice officials in Frankfurt said in an emailed statement to Reuters on Friday that they had decided against extradition because of a statute of limitations in prosecuting the case.
The formal denial of extradition was on Wednesday, the statement said, after a preliminary ruling in November.
British prosecutors had been granted warrants in 2016 for the arrest of four Germans, who they said were part of a conspiracy to defraud in relation to their alleged role in manipulating Euribor, the euro interbank offered rate.
A spokesman for Deutsche Bank declined to comment. Reuters is not naming the four former Deutsche Bank employees for legal reasons.
Deutsche Bank, Barclays (L:BARC) and Societe Generale (PA:SOGN) admitted their involvement in a Euribor cartel in 2013 in a European Commission investigation.
The Commission fined Deutsche and SocGen a total of $1 billion (715.36 million pounds), and two years later U.S. and British authorities fined the German bank another $2.5 billion and its London subsidiary pleaded guilty to rate-rigging.
Barclays received immunity for revealing the alleged cartel in the Brussels investigation but paid $453 million to U.S. and British authorities to settle rate-rigging allegations in 2012.