HSBC Executive Pleads Not Guilty to Rigging FX Markets

By Patricia Hurtado, Bloomberg News

An HSBC Holdings Plc executive pleaded not guilty Monday to rigging foreign-exchange markets in the first U.S. case of its kind.

Mark Johnson, HSBC’s global head of foreign-exchange cash trading in London, was arrested in July at New York’s Kennedy airport as he was about to board a plane for the U.K. The U.S. says he and Stuart Scott, the bank’s former head of currency trading in Europe, manipulated the pound in a front-running scheme to take advantage of inside information about a client’s $3.5 billion currency transaction, reaping $8 million for the bank. ...