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In 2004, Rick Waugh, then Bank of Nova Scotia’s chief executive, proudly posed with a gold bar for a photo to tout the Canadian bank’s new leadership position among the world’s top bullion dealers. In May that year, Scotiabank became the first non-British bank to chair the London Gold Fixing, a twice-daily setting of a key benchmark price for gold. It felt like a landmark moment for the bank.

But a little more than a decade later, Waugh’s successor Brian Porter found himself in a less pleasant sort of spotlight, as lawsuits began to roll in against Scotia and the other banks involved in setting benchmark prices for precious metals (known as the “fix”): Deutsche Bank AG, Société Générale SA, Barclays PLC and HSBC PLC.

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The allegations at the heart of the proposed class action lawsuits, filed in New York and Ontario, are unproven, but they are serious.

The five banks are accused of manipulating the gold market, which is worth trillions of dollars in trading value per year. A smaller subset, including Scotiabank, is accused of manipulating the silver market by rigging the daily Silver Fix. UBS AG, meanwhile, is accused of conspiring to exploit metals prices.