ROBOR and competition law: Romania’s landmark benchmark-setting investigation

Bruno Leroy

Leroy si Asociații, Bucharest

bruno.leroy@leroylaw.ro

Bianca Florea 

Leroy si Asociații, Bucharest

Introduction

The Romanian Competition Council has recently brought one of the most significant competition cases in the country’s enforcement history. In June 2026, the authority announced that it had sanctioned ten banks with fines totalling approximately €700m, for infringing Romanian competition law and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union through alleged coordination in the process for setting ROBOR, the Romanian Interbank Offer Rate.^[1] This represents the largest fine, in nominal terms, ever imposed by the Romanian Competition Council.

The case matters beyond Romania because benchmark-setting procedures remain an area of significant competition law sensitivity for financial institutions, particularly where banks are required to participate in structured, methodology-driven processes. It also places Romanian enforcement within a broader EU and US competition law trend, in particular following the European Commission’s Euribor, LIBOR and TIBOR cases, which the authority directly references in their public communication on this matter. It also raises an important question for courts and practitioners about how to distinguish unlawful coordination from conduct that reflects the design, transparency and constraints of a regulated benchmark framework.

The Romanian investigation

According to the Romanian Competition Council, the infringement concerned coordination of conduct in the procedure for setting ROBOR and breached both national competition rules and the TFEU. Specifically, the Romanian Competition Council decided that the ten banks involved coordinated their behaviour through an exchange of confidential and strategic information, especially on pricing, concerning the ROBOR level during the fixing procedure, the result of the fixing procedure being used to set interest rates on certain loans. The authority claimed that during the fixing window, when each bank’s quoted rates should have been submitted independently, the participating institutions instead aligned their behaviour based on competitors’ quotations.

However, the full reasoned decision will be essential in understanding the precise market definition, theory of harm and evidence relied upon, particularly because benchmark-setting can generate similar or convergent conduct without necessarily reflecting an anti-competitive agreement. While the public materials currently available indicate that the authority’s concern was alleged coordination in the benchmark-setting process itself, that allegation will need to be assessed taking the applicable methodology and market conditions into consideration.

Benchmark mechanisms necessarily involve structured participation by competing institutions, including submissions, quotations or estimates made according to a defined methodology. That process does not eliminate the requirement that each participant determines its conduct independently, but it does mean that competition law analysis should be attentive to the institutional context in which submissions are made. The competition concern arises where the benchmark process is used to reduce uncertainty between competitors, exchange sensitive information or align conduct in a way which may distort the benchmark or the products that reference it.

Procedural challenges before the courts

A particularly interesting aspect of the ROBOR matter is procedural. The Romanian Competition Council announced that it had successfully defended court challenges brought by two banks involved in the investigation. According to the authority, the banks sought to suspend certain procedural steps, including hearings, deliberations by the Plenum (the Council’s primary decision-making body) and the preparation of the decision with its extended reasoning. The courts, at first instance, rejected those requests as inadmissible.

This procedural episode may prove to be one of the more distinctive elements of the Romanian case. It illustrates a familiar tensions in such investigations: parties must be able to exercise effective rights of defence, including meaningful access-to-file rights and judicial review, while competition authorities have a legitimate interest in completing administrative proceedings and adopting a reasoned decision before the merits are litigated. For practitioners, the point is practical as well as legal: interim procedural challenges may be difficult, but they also reflect the importance of procedural safeguards in cases where the factual and economic context is complex, and the potential fines are significant.

The EU comparator: Euribor and related benchmark cases

The closest EU analogue is the European Commission’s Euro Interest Rate Derivatives (EIRD) case concerning Euribor and EONIA (Case AT.39914).^[2] EIRDs are financial derivatives linked to one or several euro interest-rate benchmarks. In that matter, the European Commission found that certain banks participated in collusive conduct relating to EIRDs covering the entire European Economic Area (EEA), which consisted of agreements and/or concerted practices that had as their object the distortion of the normal course of pricing components in the EIRD sector, in particular discussions connected with their Euribor submissions and their trading and pricing strategies. The Commission’s decision refers to communications in which traders discussed or sought approaches to Euribor submitters, including requests for submissions in a particular direction or at a specific level.

The Court of Justice’s judgment in HSBC v Commission (Case C-883/19 P), the final judgment in HSBC’s challenge to the Commission’s decision in the EIRD case, further confirmed this line of enforcement.^[3] The case concerned the Commission’s findings regarding manipulation of Euribor interbank reference rates and exchanges of confidential information and addressed the characterisation of the conduct as a restriction of competition by object under Article 101 TFEU and Article 53 EEA. The Yen Interest Rate Derivatives case (Case AT.39861), involving JPY LIBOR and Euroyen TIBOR, provides another relevant comparator.^[4]

The analogy with ROBOR should nevertheless be stated carefully. The Commission’s Euribor and LIBOR/TIBOR cases were often framed through derivatives markets and specific trader communications, whereas the Romanian case appears, based on the authority’s public communications, to focus more directly on the ROBOR-setting procedure and its domestic banking market effects. This distinction makes the Romanian case especially interesting: it appears to test the same core competition law principle, independence in benchmark-related conduct, but in a national benchmark-setting environment where the regulatory design and market context are central to the assessment.

Competition law implications

The key competition law lesson is not that every benchmark-related interaction is suspicious. Rather, a benchmark-setting framework does not immunise coordination between benchmark participants, but it should inform the assessment of what communications or conduct are objectively required by the mechanism. Even where a benchmark methodology is formalised, supervised or widely used in the market, participating institutions remain competitors. They must avoid communications that disclose or align intended submissions, desired benchmark outcomes, trading positions, pricing intentions or other commercially sensitive information not required by the benchmark rules.

This risk is heightened because benchmark rates can influence a wide range of downstream financial products, including loans. Compliance with the technical rules of a benchmark process may not be sufficient if participants coordinate in a way that reduces competitive uncertainty. At the same time, competition law analysis must take proper account of how the benchmark is designed, what information participants are required to provide, and whether the challenged conduct is better explained by the methodology, regulatory expectations or market conditions than by collusion.

The practical implications are clear, but they should not be overstated. Financial institutions participating in benchmark-setting processes should treat benchmark governance as a competition law priority, not only as a regulatory or operational matter. Submitters should be sufficiently independent from trading or commercial functions, and permitted interactions should be documented and limited to what is necessary under the benchmark methodology.

Public reactions by the banking industry

Apart from the fined banks’ statements denying the allegations of the Romanian Competition Council and announcing that they will challenge the decision in court, in a press release, the Romanian Association of Banks (ARB) characterises the decision as abusive and states that the banks are not at fault and will use all available legal remedies to obtain an annulment.^[5]

The National Bank of Romania (BNR) has also commented on the decision, asking for further clarification from the Romanian Competition Council to avoid confusion, unrealistic expectations or unfounded accusations, and emphasised that the investigation does not concern the central bank in its capacity as administrator of the system and issuer of operating rules and regulations.^[6]

Possible future developments

Several issues remain open. The publication of the fully reasoned Romanian Competition Council decision will be central to understanding the authority’s market definition, evidence and legal characterisation of the conduct. Any challenges to the decision will also determine how Romanian courts approach the relationship between benchmark methodology, banking regulation and national legislation on competition law. It will be particularly important to see whether the conduct is characterised as a restriction by object, and how the authority addresses arguments based on transparency, regulatory context, market volatility and the role of the central bank framework.

The case may also generate follow-on damages claims once the authority’s findings become final, whose level might be significantly higher than the fines’ level. A legislative proposal on the financial compensation of credit consumers harmed because of anti-competitive practices has already been put forward in the Romanian Parliament, with its explanatory memorandum directly referencing the ROBOR case.

More broadly, the investigation may prompt banks and benchmark administrators in Romania and elsewhere in the EU to revisit governance frameworks, communication protocols and competition controls around benchmark participation.

Conclusion

The ROBOR case confirms that benchmark-setting remains an active area of competition law risk within the European Union. Its novelty lies not in the proposition that benchmark manipulation can infringe competition law, since the European precedents already established that, but in the application of that logic to a national interbank reference-rate process. The case should therefore be followed closely not only as an enforcement milestone, but also as a test of how competition law accommodates the realities of regulated benchmark mechanisms. For banks, the message is that independence in submissions and related conduct must be demonstrable as well as formal.^[7]