Thomas Hayes, former trader at banks including UBS Group AG and Citigroup, August 3, 2015.
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Tom Hayes, the world’s first trader to be jailed for fixing interest rates, lost an appeal against his conviction in a London court on Wednesday.
Hayes, a former star trader at Citigroup Inc. The benchmark interest rate for pricing trillions of financial products.
Prosecutors said Hayes and other traders acted unlawfully by taking into account their or their employers’ business interests when submitting submissions about the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor).
Hayes, who was released from prison in 2021 after serving half of an 11-year sentence, has always said that the Libor rate he requested was within the allowable range and that his behavior was common at the time and was condoned by his boss.
His appeal against his conviction was heard alongside former Barclays trader Carlo Palombo, who was convicted in 2019 of distorting the euro-equivalent of Libor. Euribor ) and was convicted.
In 2022, a U.S. court issued a landmark ruling overturning the convictions of two former Deutsche Bank traders for rigging Libor, before their case was transferred to London’s Court of Appeal.
A senior judge announced Wednesday that Hayes and Palumbo’s appeals had been dismissed after a hearing that began last week.
Judge David Bean said in a summary of the Court of Appeal decision that Libor and Euribor “both require submission of funds that each bank ‘can’ borrow, which necessarily means the cheapest rate available”.
Hayes and Palumbo have 14 days to apply for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court.
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