British bank Barclays agreed to pay $100 million to 44 US states to resolve an investigation into interest-rate manipulation.

It is the first lender to settle state probes into false rate submissions that inflated borrowing costs linked to the London and US dollar interbank offered rates.

The scheme to manipulate rates from 2005 to 2009 masked Barclays's poor health during the global financial crisis at the expense of government entities and not-for-profits whose contracts were linked to the rates, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman said Monday in a statement.

The false rates also benefited Barclays’s own traders at times, the attorney general said.

Under the deal, Barclays will “neither admit nor deny” the allegations.

"This settlement is the first, but certainly not the last, with major international financial institutions that manipulated interest rate benchmarks for their own gain," Maryland attorney general Brian Frosh said in a statement about the settlement. – Bloomberg