Three former Barclays bankers found guilty over Libor rigging

Three former Barclays bankers have been found guilty of conspiring to rig a key interest rate in a high profile trial.

Jonathan Mathew (35), a Libor submitter, along with traders Jay Merchant (45) and Alex Pabon (37), were found guilty of conspiring with others at Barclays to manipulate US dollar Libor – the benchmark interbank lending rate – for more than two years, until September 2007.

They had denied wrongdoing in a 14-week trial at Southwark Crown Court in London.

Barclays' main Libor submitter Peter Johnson had pleaded guilty to the charge before the trial began.

The verdicts were delivered on Wednesday but were not able to be reported then as the jury was still deliberating on the fate of two other co-defendants and the judge imposed a reporting restriction.

However the jury was discharged yesterday after being unable to reach verdicts on the two other defendants.

It is unclear whether they will face a retrial.

‘Driven by money’

In the trial of the Barclays bankers, prosecutors set out how the defendants were “driven by money” to make more profit on their trades.

Three of the defendants were based in the bank’s New York offices and would message Libor submitters at Barclays in London when their desk was exposed or at risk of losing “huge amounts of money”, the court heard.

The defendants would tell the submitters which way they wanted the interest rates to go and the submitters would “do their best to ensure these requests were carried out”, prosecutors alleged.

Prosecutors also pointed to emails between the traders and submitters detailing what they claimed was “clear evidence of dishonesty and manipulation”.

At the time, Barclays was one of 16 panel banks that submitted daily estimates of borrowing rates to the British Bankers’ Association, which then used them to calculate the Libor rate.

The jury rejected the three defendants’ defence where they talked about a culture of fear and intimidation at Barclays and suggested the bank had never schooled the traders in the rights and wrongs of Libor setting. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016)