Five former Barclays traders have Libor convictions quashed

Five former Barclays traders who were jailed for rigging key interest rates have had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal, in a further blow to the Serious Fraud Office's most high-profile series of prosecutions.

Lord Justice Edis said on Wednesday that the convictions of Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon and Colin Bermingham would be quashed, with full reasons to follow.

The five were convicted between 2016 and 2019 of conspiring to manipulate Libor and its euro equivalent, Euribor, in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, and served prison sentences.

What were Libor and Euribor?

Libor, the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, was a benchmark interest rate set each day from estimates submitted by banks of what it would cost them to borrow from each other. It was used to price trillions of pounds of loans, mortgages and financial contracts around the world. Euribor was the equivalent for the euro. Libor has since been phased out and replaced by benchmarks based on actual transactions.

How the cases unravelled

In July 2025, the Supreme Court quashed the convictions of Tom Hayes, a former UBS and Citigroup trader, and Carlo Palombo, who worked at Barclays, ruling that juries in their trials had been given inaccurate directions. The Serious Fraud Office decided not to seek retrials, and the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the five Barclays cases to the Court of Appeal in January.

Mr Hayes was given the longest prison sentence ever handed to a white-collar criminal in Britain when he was jailed in 2015, and served half of an 11-year term.

"An injustice that never should have happened"

Jonathan Mathew said: "Having this conviction quashed is not simply about correcting the record; it's about finally having validation that this is an injustice that never should have happened."

Alex Pabon, now 48, said: "The Serious Fraud Office now accepts my conviction is unsafe. The SFO did not build this case alone: Barclays played a large role in it."

Mr Hayes said: "Today is a fantastic day for all those who have finally been exonerated."

The SFO's response

Jason Williams, of the Serious Fraud Office, said the Supreme Court had found "ample evidence on which a properly directed jury could have convicted" Mr Hayes and Mr Palombo, but that a retrial was not in the public interest. "After carefully considering this judgment and the full circumstances we do not oppose the appeals of five individuals convicted by juries in relation to Libor and Euribor," he said.

Tom Bushnell, a partner at the law firm Hickman and Rose, said the SFO "must reflect on how its repeated failure to ensure these trials were conducted fairly contributed to the collapse of its most significant series of prosecutions of the past fifteen years".

Still to come

The Court of Appeal has yet to consider the appeal of Christian Bittar, a former Deutsche Bank trader, who argues that his conviction should also be overturned. The SFO says his conviction is safe.

The Libor scandal led to billions of pounds in fines for banks in the UK, the United States and Europe, and to major reforms of how financial benchmarks are set and supervised.