British prosecutors on Thursday obtained a court order prohibiting The Wall Street Journal from publishing names of individuals the government planned to implicate in a criminal-fraud case alleging a scheme to manipulate benchmark interest rates.
A Journal story states, “A British judge ordered the Journal and David Enrich, the newspaper’s European banking editor, to comply with a request by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office prohibiting the newspaper from publishing names of individuals not yet made public in the government’s ongoing investigation into alleged manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.
“The order, which applies to publication in England and Wales, also demanded that the Journal remove ‘any existing Internet publication’ divulging the details. It threatened Mr. Enrich and ‘any third party’ with penalties including a fine, imprisonment and asset seizure.
“The Journal received word of the order from the SFO by email at 7:18 p.m. London time. The news organisation already had published on Dow Jones Newswires and the Journal’s website, WSJ.com, an article by Mr. Enrich and reporter Jenny Strasburg that divulged names of traders and brokers that British prosecutors expect to publicly name next week. The article was taken down from the website but appears in Friday’s print editions of the Journal circulated in the US and in Asia.”
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