The Court of Appeal has upheld the conviction of former Libor trader Tom Hayes today after he spent years in prison for rate-rigging.
On Wednesday, Lord Justice Bean read out a press summary at the Court of Appeal, dismissing the appeals from Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, who sought to overturn their criminal conviction.
Both men have 14 days to submit applications for the point of law of general public importance to be certified and for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes, was sentenced in 2015 to 11 years in prison after he was found guilty of conspiring to rig the London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor. He was the first person convicted in Britain of rigging the now-discredited financial benchmark.
He was also charged in the US, but he had that long-running case against him thrown out by a New York judge back in 2022.
Hayes, 44, was released from prison, on licence, in January 2021 having spent five-and-a-half years in prison.
While Palombo, 45, a former trader at Barclays, was convicted of rigging the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, known as Euribor. He was sentenced to four years in prison back in 2019 and ordered to pay prosecution costs of £725,000.
Hayes and Palombo have long been campaigning to have their names cleared.
Hayes and Palombo had their cases, which were investigated and prosecuted by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), referred to the Court of Appeal following reviews by the Criminal Case Review Commission (CCRC).
Hayes’ appeal argued that the directions given to the jury in his trial were wrong in law, which resulted in a trial that was “wholly unfair, and convictions which are unsafe.”
His lawyers also argued that court should consider the US decision to throw out his case, where the US court held that “a bank’s submission of a Libor rate did not implicitly represent that there had been no consideration of the panel bank’s existing trades”.
Palombo’s appeal relied solely on this US court decision, which is known as USA v Connolly and Black.
More to follow…