Five more former bankers convicted of rigging interest rates will be given a fresh chance to clear their names, after the supreme court overturned a decade-old ruling against the trader Tom Hayes last year.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) said on Thursday that it had referred the ex-City traders’ convictions back to the court of appeal. The men were jailed between 2016 and 2019 on charges of manipulating the euro interbank offered rate, Euribor, or the now defunct London interbank offered rate, Libor.
The Euribor and Libor rates affected the value of ordinary people’s pensions, mortgages and savings, as well as hundreds of trillions of pounds and euros worth of financial products around the world. Nine bankers accused of rigging the rates were given fraud convictions, including Hayes.
But Hayes had his name cleared in July 2025 after the supreme court found faults in the original trial. Those included the judge giving “inaccurate and unfair” instructions to the jury that found him guilty on charges of conspiracy to defraud. Carlo Palombo, a former Barclays trader sentenced to four years in prison in 2019 for rigging Euribor, had his conviction quashed on the same day.
Now the cases of Alex ?Pabon, Jay Vijay ?Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef and Colin Bermingham have been referred by the CCRC after the Serious Fraud Office, which brought the original charges, found that their convictions “may be considered unsafe” in the wake of the ruling over Hayes and Palombo.
Pabon, Merchant and Mathew were convicted of conspiracy to defraud in 2016 at Southwark crown court and were given prison sentences ranging from two to six and a half years.
In applications to the CCRC in August, they argued that the trial judge took legal directions that were found to be wrong, and that this undermined the safety of their convictions.
Moryoussef was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to eight years in prison, while Bermingham was convicted in 2019 and given a five-year sentence. They argued that their cases had the same errors as the supreme court found with Palombo.
“After analysing the submissions in all five cases … the CCRC has determined there is no distinguishing factor between these cases and the cases of Mr Hayes and Mr Palombo, and the jury misdirection and legal errors have undermined the safety of all the convictions,” the CCRC said.
Cases that are referred by the CCRC then go to the court of appeal to decide whether the conviction is unsafe.
In October, Hayes said he was suing his former employer, Swiss bank UBS, for $400m (£300m), accusing it of pinning the blame on him for the Libor scandal.
He claimed he was a “hand-picked scapegoat” for the scandal, which led to fines of almost $10bn for a dozen banks and brokerages. Hayes, who spent five and a half years of an 11-year term in prison, alleged that UBS misled US authorities and called him an “evil mastermind” behind the scandal.
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