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Tom Hayes has failed in his bid to overturn his conviction for manipulating the interest rate benchmark, with the Court of Appeal in London upholding the conviction of the former UBS and Citigroup trader nine years ago.
Hayes spent five and a half years in prison after a jury convicted him in 2015 of rigging LIBOR. He was one of nine individuals successfully prosecuted by the UK's Serious Fraud Office for record price manipulation.
The Court of Appeal heard Hayes' case alongside that of Carlo Palumbo, a former Barclays trader who was similarly convicted of manipulating the Euribor, another reference rate, and who was sentenced to four years in prison.
Both were given the opportunity to clear their names following a review by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates possible miscarriages of justice.
The pair filed their appeal over a decade after the scandal erupted over Libor – or the London interbank offered rate – which sent shockwaves through financial markets and continued to cost banks billions of dollars in fines and settlements.
A central part of Hayes' appeal case was that a 2022 ruling in the US overturned the convictions of two former Deutsche Bank traders, Matthew Connolly and Gavin Black, for their roles in the alleged Libor manipulation scheme, and led to all charges being brought against Hayes in the appeal case brought by Hayes. The United States is dropped.
However, in a summary of his ruling issued on Wednesday, Lord Justice Bean said the US ruling “cast no doubt on the validity of previous decisions” of English courts “in relation to English law”.
“Both appeals were rejected,” he added.
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