Published Oct 7, 2026 9:05 am
Colin Berminghan, third from left, and Alex Pabon, fourth from right, cheers with supporters, including British lawmaker David Davis, far right, and lawyers outside the Royal Courts of Justice after their convictions were quashed Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026, in London. (Jack Hudson/PA via AP)
LONDON (AP) — A British court on Wednesday quashed the convictions of five traders accused of manipulating benchmark interest rates in one of the biggest banking scandals to come out of the 2008 global financial crisis.
The Court of Appeal threw out the fraud convictions of former Barclays employees Jonathan Mathew, Jay Merchant, Alex Pabon, Philippe Moryoussef and Colin Bermingham.
The five were sentenced between 2016 and 2019 for offenses connected to influencing the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, or Libor, and its euro currency equivalent Euribor. The rates were used to set the interest rates on trillions of dollars of financial products around the world.
In July 2025, the U.K. Supreme Court quashed the convictions of two other traders: Tom Hayes, a former Citigroup and UBS trader, and Carlo Palombo, who worked for Barclays. It ruled that the convictions were unfair because the judges in their separate cases gave inaccurate instructions to jurors.
Lawyers for the five others argued that juries in their cases received almost identical instructions and therefore “their trials were unfair and their convictions are unsafe.”
The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office said it would not seek retrials for Hayes and Palombo and did not oppose the five other defendants’ appeals.
Libor and Euribor were critical benchmarks that were once used to set the interest rates on everything from business loans to home mortgages and credit card debt. They were based on figures submitted daily by major international banks, reporting the rate at which they could borrow money from other banks.
During the financial crisis, regulators became aware that some banks were making artificially low Libor submissions to make their institutions seem more creditworthy, or submitting fake numbers to achieve a rate that better suited them.
The Serious Fraud Office began investigating alleged efforts to manipulate Libor in 2012. That ultimately led to the conviction of nine bankers and the acquittal of 11 others.
The rates were phased out in recent years, in part because they were seen as worsening the financial crisis.