Tom Hayes loses appeal against Libor rigging conviction

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Tom Hayes has failed in his attempt to overturn his conviction for rigging an interest rate benchmark as the Court of Appeal in London upheld the guilty verdict handed to the former UBS and Citigroup trader nine years ago.

Hayes served five and a half years in prison after being convicted by a jury in 2015 for manipulating Libor. He was one of nine individuals successfully prosecuted by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office for rigging benchmark rates.

The Court of Appeal heard Hayes’s case alongside that of Carlo Palombo, an ex-Barclays trader similarly convicted of manipulating Euribor, another benchmark rate, who received a four-year sentence.

Both were given the chance to clear their names after a review by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates potential miscarriages of justice.

The pair made their appeal over a decade after the scandal erupted over Libor — or the London Interbank Offered Rate — which sent shockwaves through financial markets and went on to cost banks billions in fines and settlements.

A central part of Hayes’s appeal case was that a 2022 judgment in the US had overturned the convictions of two former Deutsche Bank traders, Matthew Connolly and Gavin Black, for their part in an alleged Libor rigging scheme, and led to all charges against Hayes in the US being dropped.

However, in a summary of his ruling on Wednesday, the Court of Appeal’s Lord Justice Bean said that the US ruling did not “cast doubt on the correctness of the previous decisions” of the English courts “as a matter of English law”.

“Both appeals are dismissed,” he said.