Oil-Price Rigging Has Echoes of Libor Manipulation

After years of suspicion for price manipulation, major oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), BP Plc(BP/), Statoil ASA (STIL) and Platts were raided on May 14th.

Antitrust regulators were looking into potential collaborations by traders which could result in detrimental effects to consumers. EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said, "To some extent this problem has similarties with the benchmarks in the financial sector and with the investigations we are carrying out on Libor..."

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