The Financial Post reports in its Saturday, Feb. 22, edition that four major banks -- Citigroup, HSBC Holdings, Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Canada -- will pay over $127-million (U.S.) to settle a long-standing antitrust case. A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post reports that the Competition and Markets Authority revealed that traders at these banks unlawfully shared sensitive information about gilt trading in chatrooms from 2009 to 2013. This settlement concludes the investigation that began in 2018, focusing on traders' conduct during U.K. government gilt auctions. Antitrust watchdogs across Europe have spent more than a decade probing how bank traders swapped information in chatrooms, leading to billions of euros in fines. The investigations followed the EU's approval for billions of euros in government support to keep many European lenders alive during the financial crisis. "Deutsche Bank and RBC also co-ordinated their strategies for trading gilts via brokers on a limited number of occasions," the CMA said in a statement. Some of the alleged collusion happened in relation to Bank of England holding buyback auctions in 2009, in response to the financial crisis as a part of its quantitative easing policy.