The Royal Courts of Justice, London
The Court of Appeal in London has thrown out the convictions of five former Barclays traders who were jailed for allegedly rigging the benchmark interest rates banks on both sides of the Atlantic relied on for short-term lending.
The ruling clears former Barclays employees Jonathan Mathew, Jay Merchant, Alex Pabon, Philippe Moryoussef and Colin Bermingham. Mathew, Bermingham and Moryoussef were based in London, while Merchant and Pabon worked out of the bank’s LIBOR operation in New York. The five were sentenced at various points between 2016 and 2019.
Their appeals rested on a precedent set last year, when the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, two other traders jailed over LIBOR and Euribor rigging. The Supreme Court found those convictions unfair because “the judges in their separate cases gave inaccurate instructions to jurors,” a legal flaw that undermined the fairness of the trials themselves rather than the underlying facts of the case.
Lawyers for the five Barclays traders argued the same defect applied to their own cases, since their juries “received almost identical instructions and therefore ‘their trials were unfair and their convictions are unsafe.'” The Serious Fraud Office chose not to oppose any of the five appeals, a decision that effectively conceded the point before the Court of Appeal issued its ruling.
The SFO has also said it will not seek retrials for Hayes and Palombo following their own convictions being quashed, suggesting prosecutors are treating the underlying jury-instruction issue as a closed matter rather than pursuing fresh trials against any of the traders whose cases have now been overturned on the same legal grounds.
