A former Deutsche Bank senior trader pleaded guilty to conspiring to rig a key lending benchmark, the latest admission in a long-running investigation.

Michael Ross Curtler, 43 years old, on Thursday pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to manipulate the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which underpins interest rates in trillions of dollars of financial contracts, from corporate debt to home mortgages.

In the complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court, the authorities said Mr. Curtler, a British citizen working for Deutsche Bank's U.S. dollar cash desk, colluded with others to manipulate the rates to benefit their trading positions.

While rate manipulation was widespread, the authorities have said Deutsche Bank was especially aggressive and had slowed the probe by refusing to cooperate fully or misleading investigators. In April, the Frankfurt-based bank admitted to the manipulation and agreed to pay a record $2.5 billion to resolve charges in the U.S. and the U.K.

Mr. Curtler is the first person associated with Deutsche Bank to be charged.

He was released on bail and is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 19. Under the terms of his release, he is allowed to travel within the U.S., the U.K., France, Spain, Germany, Portugal and Dubai.

His lawyer didn't return a call for comment.

Some of the world's largest banks have agreed to pay billions of dollars in fines to resolve a long-running investigation into whether traders colluded to move foreign-currency rates for their own financial benefit.

Write to Maria Armental at maria.armental@wsj.com

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 08, 2015 16:55 ET (20:55 GMT)