Ex-Barclays bankers have ther interest rate fraud convictions overturned

Appeal Court judges in London threw out the convictions Wednesday of five former Barclays Bank traders who were imprisoned for allegedly rigging the London Interbank Offered Rate, the benchmark short-term interest rate for lending between banks, in the run up to the financial crisis.

Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef and Colin Bermingham, who were based in London, and Jay Merchant and Alex Pabon, who worked at the bank's LIBOR operation in New York, had long since served out their sentences handed down between 2016 and 2019.

Mathew, Merchant, Pabon and Moryoussef were convicted of conspiracy to defraud for their roles in helping to manipulate LIBOR while Bermingham was convicted of a single count of conspiracy to defraud in his role supervising Barclays' daily submissions for the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, a parallel reference rate for banks operating in the Euro area.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred their cases back to the courts in January, six months after the Supreme Court quashed the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, who had also been convicted in 2015 and 2019 of charges related to LIBOR and EURIBOR.

The Court of Appeal upheld the convictions of Hayes and Palombo in 2024 forcing the pair to take their case all the way to the Supreme Court, which subsequently overruled the lower court in July 2025.

The CCRC said in its January ruling that it was sending the cases of the five back to the Appeal Court after determining "there was no distinguishing factor between these cases and the cases of Mr. Hayes and Mr. Palombo."

The commission said the fact that the same jury misdirection and legal errors had been repeated in the trials of Mathew, Merchant, Pabon, Moryoussef and Bermingham undermined the safety of their convictions.

The Serious Fraud Office, which prosecuted the interest rate rigging cases following a years-long investigation, conceded in January that the convictions of the five bankers "may be" unsafe.