One more ex-banker jailed for rigging rates has conviction overturned

Speaking after his conviction was quashed, Bittar said: “Finally the injustice of what I and others suffered has been recognised.

“I am so grateful for those who stood by me through this ordeal and those who worked so tirelessly to correct it.”

His wife, Caroline, who lives in the UK, said their family had lost 15 “valuable years”, with their children “growing up with this injustice”.

She added they were looking forward to “enjoying life with our family and friends without this shadow hanging over us”.

On Wednesday, Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Alex Pabon, Colin Bermingham and Philippe Mouryoussef saw their convictions for ‘manipulating’ the interest rate benchmarks Libor and Euribor quashed after a 10-year struggle for justice.

They launched fresh appeals against their jail sentences following a Supreme Court ruling last year that acquitted Tom Hayes, the first to be jailed for ‘rigging’ interest rates in 2015, and Carlo Palombo, jailed in 2019.

Tom Hayes, who was initially sentenced to 14 years, reduced on appeal to 11, is now seeking damages from his former employer UBS.

The traders were among 37 City traders and brokers prosecuted for “manipulating” the interest rate benchmarks Libor and Euribor, which track the cost of borrowing cash between the banks and have been used to set the interest rates on millions of mortgages and commercial loans.

The BBC has uncovered evidence of a much larger, state-led ‘rigging’ of interest rates, under pressure from central banks and governments across the world. Evidence implicating Downing Street and the Bank of England was suppressed throughout the criminal trials.

Former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis told the BBC the innocent traders had been the victims of a series of miscarriages of justice.

He said the people exonerated this week and before were “the victims of a scapegoating exercise which arose as a result of the government’s own misbehaviour in lowballing [falsely understating] Libor interest rates themselves, in order to try and rescue the economy after their own self-induced crash in the late 2000s”.

In 2015, during the first trial for interest rate ‘rigging’, of former UBS trader Hayes, Mr Justice Jeremy Cooke decided as a matter of law that any attempt to influence the rates could not be lawful, and that any rate influenced by commercial interest must automatically be false. Judges in the subsequent eight trials followed suit.

However, in July 2025, the Supreme Court decided that all the judges had erred, misdirecting juries that it was wrong as a matter of law. Instead, whether the requests were right or wrong was properly a matter of fact for the jury to decide, not the judge.

All convictions in the United States were overturned in 2022 after an appeal court ruled that there was insufficient evidence that the traders’ requests had broken any rules or laws.