U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the Southern District of New York.

An eleventh-hour push to block proposed settlements with two defendant banks over their role in the manipulation of the benchmark London Intrabank Offering Rate hit a dead end Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the Southern District of New York told co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs she had “no issue on the merits” of the proposed settlements between Barclays and Citibank with the over-the-counter group of plaintiffs for $120 million and $130 million, respectively.

“I don't have an issue with the reasonableness of the settlement,” the judge informed Susman Godfrey partner Seth Ard, who presented on behalf of the plaintiffs during the fairness hearing.

Buchwald's comments signaled the end of the road for Arent Fox's Les Jacobowitz and his clients, the Virgin Islands Public Finance Authority. Jacobowitz hoped to use the hearing and his client's objection to the proposed settlement to continue to press his concerns over the lack of calculated damages in the suit.

Before the substance of Jacobowitz's arguments could be heard, the judge demanded he answer objections by the plaintiffs' counsel over the U.S. Virgin Islands' standing.

In a reply to Jacobowitz's Jan. 2 objection to the proposed Citibank settlement, in which he presented calculations that placed the bank's liability for manipulating the crucial interest rate benchmark at nearly $24 billion, co-lead counsel said that the claimant lacked standing.

This issue, attorneys from Susman Godfrey and Hausfeld said, was that the swap deal the U.S. Virgin Islands put forward was not ultimately affected directly by potential LIBOR manipulation.

At the hearing Tuesday, Buchwald noted that nowhere in the swap details the U.S. Virgin Islands was offering as proof of its status was the term “LIBOR” mentioned and Jacobowitz conceded as much. However, he said, conversations with experts and research that he had recently conducted, including information provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, showed that part of the rate in the swap agreement his clients entered into was underpinned by the three-month LIBOR during the class period.

Buchwald noted that a number of actions with claims about interest rates comparable to the LIBOR one attempted to enter the multidistrict litigation before the court—but those were not the same. Similarly, she said, the transaction involving the U.S. Virgin Islands was not an actual LIBOR one. While it may actually fall into associated suits, Jacobowitz's clients had no standing in the current one, the judge said.

“I think that's the end of it,” she said.

The Barclays settlement was announced in 2015 and a fairness hearing was held in October of last year, where Jacobowitz first raised concerns about the lack of publicly available information about damages. The Citibank settlement was announced in August of last year.

While the $250 million in class settlements appear all but certain to be approved, after the hearing Jacobowitz noted that a number of major institutions, including two Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. class members and both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have requested exclusion from the class to pursue their own suits against the LIBOR panel banks.