Barclays Plc agreed to pay $100 million to 44 U.S. states to resolve an investigation into interest-rate manipulation by the British bank. It's the first lender to settle state probes into false rate submissions that inflated borrowing costs linked to the London and U.S. 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' own traders at times, the attorney general said.

"There has to be one set of rules for everyone, no matter how rich or how powerful, and that includes big banks and other financial institutions that engage in fraud or impair the fair functioning of financial markets," Schneiderman said in the statement.