Traders jailed for interest rate rigging have convictions overturned

Two traders jailed for rigging benchmark involvement rates person had their convictions overturned by the Supreme Court.

Tom Hayes, 45, was handed a 14-year jailhouse condemnation - cut to 11 years connected appeal - successful 2015, which was 1 of the toughest ever to beryllium imposed for white-collar transgression successful UK history.

The erstwhile Citigroup and UBS trader, on with Carlo Palombo, 46, who was jailed for 4 years successful 2019 implicit rigging the Euribor involvement rates, took their cases to the country's highest tribunal aft the Court of Appeal dismissed their appeals past year.

The Supreme Court unanimously allowed Hayes' appeal, overturning his 2015 condemnation of 8 counts of conspiracy to defraud by manipulating Libor, a now-defunct benchmark involvement rate.

Ex-vice president of euro rates astatine Barclays slope Mr Palombo's condemnation for conspiring with others to taxable mendacious oregon misleading Euribor submissions betwixt 2005 and 2009 was besides quashed.

A spokesperson for the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), which opposed the appeals, said it would not beryllium seeking a retrial.

In 2012, the SFO began transgression investigations into traders it suspected of manipulating the Libor and Euribor benchmark involvement rates.

Mr Hayes was the archetypal idiosyncratic to beryllium prosecuted by the SFO, which brought prosecutions against 20 radical betwixt 2013 and 2019, 7 of whom were convicted astatine trial, 2 pleaded blameworthy and 11 were acquitted.

He had besides been facing transgression charges successful the US but these were dismissed aft 2 different men progressive successful a akin lawsuit had their convictions reversed successful 2022.

Mr Hayes, a talented mathematician who is autistic, was described astatine his Southwark Crown Court proceedings arsenic the "ringmaster" astatine the centre of an tremendous fraud to manipulate benchmark involvement rates and boost his ain six-figure earnings.

He has ever maintained that the Libor rates helium requested fell wrong a permissible scope and that his behaviour was communal astatine the clip and condoned by bosses.

Mr Hayes and Mr Palombo argued their convictions depended connected a explanation of Libor and Euribor which assumes determination is an implicit ineligible barroom connected a bank's commercialized interests being taken into relationship erstwhile mounting rates.

The sheet of 5 Supreme Court justices recovered determination was "ample evidence" for a assemblage to convict the 2 men if it had been decently directed.

But successful an 82-page judgment, Lord Leggatt said assemblage absorption errors made some convictions unsafe, adding: "That misdirection undermined the fairness of the trial."