Eleven French banks fined for cheque charge collusion

The Autorité de la Concurrence, the country's competition authority, punished the institutions, including BNP Paribas and HSBC, for charging a 4.3 cent fee on 80% of the cheques exchanged in France between January 2002 and July 2007. Although the banks had argued they needed to raise charges in order to meet the costs of the transition to a new digital system for processing checks, the authority found this was not the case. The organisation says: "For the calculation of fines, the Autorité has taken into account the gravity and the duration of the practices. "The Autorité has also ...