London Court of Appeal quashes convictions of five Barclays traders — The Guardian
The Court of Appeal in London, United Kingdom, on October 7 quashed the convictions of five former Barclays traders who had been jailed in cases involving manipulation of the Libor and Euribor interbank rates. According to The Guardian, they are Jay Vijay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon and Colin Bermingham.
Interbank rate cases
All five were sentenced to prison in 2016–2019 on charges of manipulating either the European interbank offered rate, Euribor, or the London interbank offered rate, Libor, which is no longer used. These rates affected the cost of pensions, mortgages and savings, as well as financial products worth hundreds of trillions of pounds sterling and euros.
The Court of Appeal's decision came more than a year after the UK Supreme Court quashed the conviction of Tom Hayes, a former UBS and Citigroup trader. In July 2025, the conviction of former Barclays trader Carlo Palombo, who was sentenced to four years in prison in 2019 in the Euribor case, was also quashed.
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Position of the Serious Fraud Office
The Supreme Court concluded that judges in the original trials of Hayes and Palombo had given the juries inaccurate and unfair directions, depriving the defendants of a fair trial. In January, the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the cases of the five former Barclays employees to the Court of Appeal.
The UK's Serious Fraud Office, which brought the original charges, said after the Supreme Court's ruling that the convictions could be found unsafe and did not oppose the appeals. The agency said that, having considered the ruling and all the circumstances, it would not oppose the appeals of the five individuals.
Jonathan Mathew said that for ten years, the burden of his criminal conviction had stayed with him every day, and that the quashing of the conviction confirmed an injustice that should not have happened. On Friday, the appeal of former Deutsche Bank trader Christian Bittar, who pleaded guilty in 2018, is also due to be considered. This is the only case in which the Serious Fraud Office is challenging the appeal, insisting that the conviction is safe.
