Foreign news: Five banks to pay US$5.4bn fines, Deutsche bankers sent on leave, PayPal bill for Bill 21 May 2015 3:45PM Banking Day staff Foreign news, Five major banks - Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, The Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS - have agreed to US2.5 billion in fines and charges imposed by the US Department of Justice. The majority of fines and charges stem from foreign exchange rate manipulation. The Federal Reserve also announced it was imposing fines of over US$1.6 billion on the five banks; and Barclays settled related claims with the New York State Department of Financial Services, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority for an additional combined penalty of approximately US$1.3 billion, pushing the total to US$5.4 billion. In conjunction with previously announced settlements with regulatory agencies in the United States and elsewhere, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, the total fines and penalties paid by these five banks for their conduct in the FX spot market are approaching US$9 billion. Deutsche Bank has sent both its co-heads of corporate finance in Asia away on leave, for unrelated reasons. Sources told Bloomberg that Douglas Morton, who ran Deutsche Bank's investment banking coverage in Asia, was placed on leave over a suspected breach of internal compliance rules. Venky Vishwanathan, responsible for the capital markets and treasury solutions business in Singapore, was also off on leave over alleged market manipulation and mis-selling of Icelandic bank derivatives in 2008, when he co-ran the bank's western European financial institutions group. PayPal has been found to have illegally signed up US consumers for its online credit product - previously called 'Bill Me Later' - without their permission and failed to address disputes when customers complained. The US agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said PayPal must refund US$15 million to consumers, pay a US$10 million penalty, and improve disclosures for its PayPal Credit product, Finextra reports. A "new-age universal bank" is being set up by Rajiv Lall, founder of India's highly profitable budget airline IndiGo, FT.com reports. The new lender, IDFC, is one of "a profusion of Indian upstarts" that have been given banking licences by the Reserve Bank of India under governor Raghuram Rajan's broad plans to bolster competition. Lall's IDFC - the first new Indian private bank in a decade - will be primarily an infrastructure financier, aiming to broaden its base to include retail customers. Lall plans to apply a mix of technology and "basic services, delivered quickly" to win market share from India's state-run banking incumbents, who control three-quarters of the sector's assets, FT.com reports.