Court of Appeal Clears Five Former Barclays Traders in Libor Rigging Case

Five former Barclays traders who were convicted in connection with the manipulation of key interest rate benchmarks have had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal. The ruling, delivered on Wednesday, marks the latest chapter in a legal saga that has stretched across more than a decade and raises fresh questions about the prosecutions brought in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

The men — Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon and Colin Bermingham — had each been found guilty of a single count of conspiracy to defraud. Their cases centred on allegations that they attempted to influence the rates at which banks lent to one another, specifically the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) and its eurozone equivalent, Euribor.

The convictions were overturned after a long-running appeals process that gained momentum from earlier successes by other traders. Two former City traders had their convictions quashed last year, a development that opened the door for others convicted in the same series of prosecutions to challenge their own verdicts. Lord Justice Edis indicated that the full reasoning behind Wednesday's decision would be published later in the day.

The case dates back to the financial crisis, a period when public anger at the banking sector was intense. Libor and Euribor were used to set borrowing costs on a vast array of financial products, from mortgages to car finance deals, meaning even small manipulations could have wide-reaching effects. When the scandal erupted in 2012, it emerged that banks had been misrepresenting their positions during the rate-setting process at the height of the crisis, thereby boosting profits and concealing financial difficulties.

Prosecutors portrayed the traders as emblematic of banker greed at a time when taxpayers were funding bailouts of the financial sector. Between 2015 and 2019, some 19 City traders were convicted across nine criminal trials held in London and New York. The prosecutions were joint efforts involving authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.

For the men cleared on Wednesday, the consequences have been severe. Merchant, Mathew, Pabon and Bermingham each served prison terms, while Moryoussef was sentenced in his absence in 2018. He never returned to the UK to serve his sentence after France declined to extradite him. The burden of the past decade weighed heavily on those involved, as Mathew, 45, made clear in comments following the ruling.

Mathew described the "strain" of the ordeal as a burden he had carried for ten years. He said the quashing of his conviction was not merely about setting the record straight but about receiving validation that an injustice had occurred. He noted that he now has two children and that correcting the record mattered greatly for their sake.

Merchant, 55, said he looked forward to moving on with his life. He added, however, that part of that process would involve ensuring that those responsible for what happened are held fully accountable — a remark that hints at possible further legal or official scrutiny of the original prosecutions.

The appeals were underpinned by arguments that have gained traction in recent years. Tom Hayes, a former trader at Swiss bank UBS, was the first banker jailed over rate rigging. He spent a decade fighting his conviction before the Supreme Court overturned it in July 2025. His case, alongside that of fellow trader Carlo Palombo, who was jailed in 2019, established a pathway for others to challenge their convictions. Hayes and Palombo argued that they had been wrongly prosecuted for conduct that amounted to normal commercial practice, and that the prosecutions were driven by a desire to appease public anger toward banks over the financial crisis.

The latest ruling leaves only two traders still carrying convictions related to interest rate rigging. Christian Bittar, a former Deutsche Bank trader, was jailed in 2018 after pleading guilty and served two years in prison. He is scheduled to challenge his conviction on 9 October. Peter Johnson, a former Barclays trader, was the original whistleblower who brought attention to the Libor scandal. He pleaded guilty on advice that he had little prospect of winning at trial and now hopes to appeal as well.

The decision carries significant implications beyond the individuals involved. It adds to a growing body of appellate rulings that have undermined the legal foundations of the Libor prosecutions, which were once held up as a landmark effort to hold bankers accountable for misconduct during the financial crisis. The Serious Fraud Office, which brought several of the UK cases, may now face difficult questions about the conduct of those investigations and prosecutions.

For the men cleared on Wednesday, the ruling represents the end of a legal battle that has dominated much of their adult lives. For the wider public, it reopens a debate about how responsibility for the financial crisis should be assigned and whether the criminal justice system was used appropriately in pursuing individual traders for practices that their defenders characterise as commonplace in the industry at the time. The full written judgment from the Court of Appeal is expected to shed further light on the reasoning that led to the convictions being quashed.