Tom Hayes, the ex-banker jailed for rate-rigging, has said he was “scapegoated” and compared himself to Post Office campaigner Alan Bates amid growing calls for his appeal to go to the Supreme Court.
Hayes, formerly of UBS and Citigroup, told the Daily Mail that would like to meet Bates, the former sub-postmaster who led the campaign to expose the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.
“He will understand what it is like to go up against a large institution for many years,” he said. “Whether he wants to meet me is a different matter. He might not, he probably doesn’t.”
The Court of Appeal last month upheld the convictions of Hayes and Carlo Palombo, formerly of Barclays, after they spent years in prison for rigging the Libor and Euribor rate benchmarks respectively.
Hayes and Palombo were among 37 City traders prosecuted for rigging the two benchmarks, which track what banks pay to borrow cash from each other.
They have said they will apply to the Court of Appeal to take their cases to the Supreme Court. Several senior politicians have also called last month’s ruling unfair, as well as the steering committee for Euribor, which on Friday accused judges of repeatedly ignoring the “meaning and intention” of rules they drew up.
Hayes told the Mail that he felt like he “was scapegoated for the global financial crisis”, which he “had nothing to do with”.
The pair’s lawyers have argued they were only picking from a range of accurate interest rates on offer on the market and cited a US court’s decision to throw out the case.
“My co-defendants were acquitted. I wasn’t a submitter. I was convicted of a conspiracy of one to rig a rate I didn’t even choose,” Hayes said.
“I was facing a 200-year indictment in the US. I had a nervous breakdown and I embarked on a series of false confessions to get myself charged here in the UK.”
“The irony of ironies is had I gone to the US I would have been completely exonerated,” he continued.