In re Interest Rate Swaps Antitrust Litig.

351 F. Supp. 3d 698
CourtDistrict Court, S.D. Illinois
DecidedNovember 20, 2018
Docket16-MD-2704 (PAE); 16-MC-2704 (PAE)
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 351 F. Supp. 3d 698 (In re Interest Rate Swaps Antitrust Litig.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, S.D. Illinois primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
In re Interest Rate Swaps Antitrust Litig., 351 F. Supp. 3d 698 (S.D. Ill. 2018).

Opinion

PAUL A. ENGELMAYER, District Judge:

This decision resolves defendants' motion to dismiss the Amended Complaint ("AC") of trueEX, LLC ("trueEX"), Dkt. 510,1 for failure to state a claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6).

For the reasons that follow, the Court denies the principal relief sought by that motion: dismissal of trueEX's claims under § 1 of the Sherman Act (and of trueEX's parallel claims under New York's antitrust statute, the Donnelly Act). The Court, however, grants the motion to dismiss trueEX's state-law claims of unjust enrichment and tortious interference.

I. Introduction

Defendants' motion to dismiss trueEX's AC presents an unusual problem, in that it asks the Court to dismiss an antitrust claim that, as formulated by the other plaintiffs in their earlier complaints in this multi-district litigation, the Court has held plausibly pled.

trueEX's AC pleads that its platform for the trading of interest rate swaps ("IRSs") was a target of a group boycott conspiracy, in violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1, beginning around 2013 among investment banks who dealt in IRSs (the "Dealer Defendants" or "Dealers"). The Court has already sustained such a claim, as brought by other plaintiffs in earlier-filed complaints in this MDL. Specifically, in July 2017, the Court resolved motions to dismiss the complaints brought by a putative class of investor plaintiffs and by two non-class plaintiffs: Javelin Capital Markets LLC ("Javelin") and Tera Group, LLC ("Tera"). These non-class plaintiffs had, alongside trueEX, developed electronic trading platforms that were operational by 2013 or 2014 and that, as alleged, stood to offer anonymous all-to-all electronic trading of IRSs that threatened to cut into the Dealers' profit margins. As relevant here, those earlier plaintiffs had alleged that, between 2013 and 2016, the Dealers had conspired to boycott the nascent all-to-all platforms not only of Javelin and Tera, but of trueEX as well. In the July 2017 ruling, the Court sustained these claims. The Court held that these plaintiffs had plausibly pled a conspiracy whose targets included the Javelin and Tera platforms and that of then-non-party trueEX. See In re Interest Rate Swaps Antitrust Litig. , 261 F.Supp.3d 430, 474 (S.D.N.Y. 2017)

*701(" IRS I ").2

On June 14, 2018, with discovery well underway as to the earlier plaintiffs' claims, trueEX filed a complaint of its own in which it adopted this theory for its own benefit. See Dkt. 411. There, and in its ensuing AC, filed August 7, 2018, Dkt. 464, trueEX sought relief claiming, consistent with the earlier plaintiffs' surviving claims, that its IRS platform had been among the targets of the alleged conspiracy. trueEX's claims are coextensive with those of the earlier plaintiffs, save that it alleges that the conspiracy, as aimed at the trueEX platform, continued through the date of its AC. On August 28, 2018, defendants moved to dismiss the AC. Dkt. 511 ("Def. Mem.").3

In moving to dismiss the AC notwithstanding the Court's earlier decision, defendants argue, in essence, that facts pled by trueEX or otherwise newly cognizable in light of the AC detract from the claim earlier held plausible: that defendants' conspiracy extended to trueEX. Defendants argue that trueEX's AC must be evaluated on its own terms. And, they argue, the facts now cognizable make implausible a theory that Dealers conspired to boycott trueEX. These include that various Dealers, at points between 2013 and the date of the AC, (1) cleared trades for trueEX, (2) on-boarded with, and traded on, trueEX, (3) established a direct connection to, and provided live quotes on, trueEX, and/or (4) provided live quotes to trueEX's anonymous, all-to-all central limit order book ("CLOB"). See AC ¶¶ 9 & n.2, 10, 197-202, 218-219, 227. Defendants also argue that the AC's theory that Dealers boycotted, in addition to trueEX's anonymous trading platform for IRS, trueEx's "name disclosed" (i.e. , non-anonymous) request-for-quotes ("RFQ") platform is in tension with the Dealers' ostensible goal of preserving non-anonymous RFQ trading as a profit center. Finally, defendants also note that trueEX's IRS trading platform has survived, as reflected in the AC's allegation that the Dealers' boycott "continues to this day," AC ¶ 4, and argue that this allegation is implausible given this pending litigation.

These facts, defendants argue, differentiate trueEX's situation from those of Javelin and Tera, whose all-to-all IRS trading platforms the earlier plaintiffs pled had been destroyed by the Dealers' near-complete boycott of them and associated services. Defendants argue that these facts undermine trueEX's claims that its platform was a target of a boycott. Defendants argue that the extent of parallel Dealer conduct towards the trueEX platform is less than that towards the Javelin and Tera platforms. They note, for example, that trueEX offers no analogue to the striking incident in which, on the first business day after Tera's first trade, four Dealers "made the identical demand of Tera (to audit its rulebook) as a condition for clearing trades...." IRS I , 261 F.Supp.3d at 475. Independently, individual defendants argue that, even if a conspiracy among Dealers whose objects included hobbling trueEX has been plausibly pled, the facts linking certain individual defendants to that object are too sparse to allow trueEX's claim against them to stand.

*702trueEX counters with several arguments. It argues that the Court's earlier decision that trueEX was a target of the Dealers' plausibly-pled boycott conspiracy is law of the case and cannot be reconsidered on a motion to dismiss. trueEX also disputes that some facts on which defendants rely are cognizable; it argues that, while the fact of public filings and publications may be noticed, the Dealers improperly treat for the truth of the matter asserted facts embedded in these public materials. On the merits, trueEX contends that its AC asserts sufficient facts to support the inference of a boycott. These include conduct directly tending to limit the success of, and the liquidity extended to, trueEX's all-to-all anonymous IRS trading platform; and conduct tending to check the growth of trueEX's other platforms for trading IRSs such as its non-anonymous RFQ platform (platforms which, if successful, had potential to give traction to trueEX's anonymous all-to-all platform). trueEX contends that its AC broadly alleges numerous acts by Dealers antithetical to trueEX's goal of growing the all-to-all platform, including similar stratagems engaged in by multiple Dealers that fortify the claim of concerted action.

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

Related

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
351 F. Supp. 3d 698, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/in-re-interest-rate-swaps-antitrust-litig-ilsd-2018.