Washington, May 20 (EFE).– The U.S. government said Wednesday that five of the world’s largest banks have agreed to pay a combined total of nearly $3 billion in criminal fines and penalties for rigging currency rates.

Those global financial institutions “for years participated in a brazen display of collusion and foreign exchange rate market manipulation and will as a result pay a total of nearly $3 billion in fines and penalties,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said at a press conference.

Four of the banks – U.S.-based Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase and Britain’s Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland – agreed to plead guilty to felony charges of “conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros exchanged in the foreign currency exchange spot market,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

As part of that settlement, the banks agreed to pay criminal fines totaling more than $2.5 billion.

Citibank, which was involved in the conspiracy from as early as December 2007 until at least January 2013, the longest period of time, agreed to pay a fine of $925 million.

The fifth bank, Swiss-based UBS, agreed to plead guilty to violating a 2012 non-prosecution settlement it reached with U.S. prosecutors over manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

The Justice Department said that bank’s “deceptive currency trading and sales practices in conducting certain FX market transactions” violated that earlier agreement.

UBS also agreed pay a criminal penalty of $203 million. EFE