The Court of Appeal in London has quashed the criminal convictions of five former financial traders for manipulating the Libor and Euribor interest rate benchmarks, in the latest twist in the long-running rigging scandal that once shook global finance.
The decision to overturn the convictions follows a landmark 2025 ruling by the UK Supreme Court that quashed the convictions of two other former traders, effectively determining the outcome of these appeals. 'There is a directly applicable decision of the Supreme Court, which in substance, in our judgment, determines these appeals,' said judge Andrew Edis as he delivered the appeal court decision.
The five men — Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon and Colin Bermingham — all worked at Barclays. Manipulation of the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, or Libor, and its euro equivalent Euribor occurred in the run-up to and following the 2008 global financial crisis. The international scandal led to prison sentences for individual traders and massive fines for major banks.
Mathew, 45, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud in 2016 alongside Pabon and Merchant, who were Libor traders based in New York. Their prison sentences ranged from two to six and a half years. Ahead of the court's formal announcement, representatives of the five welcomed the ruling.
'For the last 10 years, the stain of a criminal conviction has been a burden I have carried every minute of every day,' said Mathew, who had been a junior trader based in London. '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.'
Moryoussef was a London-based senior trader convicted of conspiracy to defraud in 2018 and sentenced to eight years in prison. He too saw his conviction overturned.
The Supreme Court's 2025 ruling effectively held that the prosecution's theory of the cases — that traders' attempts to influence benchmark submissions to benefit their trading positions amounted to dishonesty — could not stand in the form in which the convictions were secured. The ruling has unravelled years of enforcement work by the Serious Fraud Office, which had pursued the traders through lengthy and expensive trials.
The quashing of the convictions raises profound questions about one of the most high-profile white-collar prosecutions in British history. Billions of pounds in fines were levied on banks including Barclays, UBS, RBS and Deutsche Bank over benchmark manipulation, and the episode was a major driver of reforms that eventually led to Libor being phased out.
For the five men, the decision ends a decade-long legal ordeal. Whether the Serious Fraud Office will seek any further proceedings, or whether the episode prompts a wider reckoning over how the cases were prosecuted, remains to be seen.