By Kevin Crowley and Lindsay Fortado March 30 (Bloomberg) -- Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc was fined 28.6 million pounds ($43 million), the largest U.K. regulatory penalty against a financial institution, for giving confidential pricing data to Barclays Plc. Two employees in RBS’s professional practices coverage team disclosed confidential future pricing data to their counterparts at Barclays from October 2007 to at least February 2008, the Office of Fair Trading said today in statement. Barclays isn’t likely to be fined because it brought the matter to the antitrust regulator’s attention, the OFT said. “The disclosures by RBS took place in the course of a number of contacts on the fringes of social, client or industry events or through telephone conversations,” the London-based regulator said in today’s statement. RBS is selling assets and rebuilding its capital reserves after receiving a 45.5 billion-pound bailout from the British government. The fine is the first the OFT has levied against a bank in a competition investigation and one of the office’s largest-ever, spokeswoman Corinne Gladstone said. The fine was reduced from 33.6 million pounds because RBS cooperated with the probe, the OFT said. This situation is a “deeply regrettable and isolated case,” RBS said in a statement. One of the employees who was involved left the bank and the other faces suspension and further investigation following the settlement, RBS said. “We have cooperated fully with the OFT throughout and have introduced stringent additional competition law training to ensure that this unacceptable behavior does not happen again,” a spokeswoman for the Edinburgh-based lender said. Loan Pricing Disclosed The information disclosed to London-based Barclays, the U.K.’s second-biggest bank, included the pricing of loans to professional-services firms such as accountants, lawyers and real estate businesses, the regulator said. Barclays voluntarily alerted the OFT to the breaches on March 17, 2008, after its employees had been approached by RBS workers “in a manner which we regarded as inappropriate,” the bank said in a statement today. “As a result, the Office of Fair Trading conducted an investigation with which Barclays has been cooperating,” Barclays spokesman Alistair Smith said in the statement. In 2007, the OFT issued a record 121.5 million-pound fine against British Airways Plc for price-fixing violations with Virgin Atlantic Airways on long-haul flights. The Financial Services Authority’s largest fine was a 17 million-pound levy against Royal Dutch Shell Plc for market abuse in 2004. To contact the reporter on this story: Kevin Crowley in London at kcrowley1@bloomberg.net; Lindsay Fortado in London at lfortado@bloomberg.net.

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