Nocturnal 
Five former Barclays traders who were jailed for rigging key global interest rates have had their convictions overturned, more than a decade after the scandal first broke.
Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon and Colin Bermingham all had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal on Wednesday, following a long-running legal battle to clear their names.
The five were originally convicted of a single count of conspiracy to defraud over claims they tried to manipulate Libor and Euribor, the benchmark rates once used to set borrowing costs on everything from mortgages to car finance deals around the world.
Merchant, Mathew, Pabon and Bermingham had all served various jail terms between 2016 and 2019. Moryoussef, a French national, was sentenced in his absence in 2018 and never served time in the UK after France refused to extradite him.
Lord Justice Edis said the full reasoning behind the ruling would be set out later. Speaking afterwards, Mathew, 45, said the “stain” of a criminal conviction had been “a burden I have carried every minute of every day” for the last decade.
“Having this conviction quashed is not simply about correcting the record, it’s about finally having validation that this is an injustice that never should have happened,” he said, adding that it mattered for the sake of his two children.
Merchant, 55, said he was looking forward to moving on with his life but wanted to see “those responsible for what happened” held “fully accountable”. Pabon thanked Hayes, saying he “refused to let it go and pushed this through for all of us”.
How we got here
The Libor scandal erupted in 2012, when it emerged that banks had been misrepresenting their positions as they helped set the lending rate during the 2008 financial crisis, boosting profits and masking problems at the height of the crash. The traders became a lightning rod for public anger at bankers, even as the financial sector was propped up by taxpayer-funded bailouts.
Around 19 City traders were convicted in the UK and US between 2015 and 2019, across nine separate criminal trials in London and New York. Tom Hayes, a former UBS and Citigroup trader, was the first to be jailed, in 2015. He spent a decade fighting his conviction before the Supreme Court finally quashed it in July 2025, along with that of former Barclays trader Carlo Palombo, after ruling that trial judges had given juries “inaccurate and unfair” instructions that deprived the men of a fair trial.
That ruling prompted the Criminal Cases Review Commission to refer the cases of Merchant, Mathew, Moryoussef, Pabon and Bermingham back to the Court of Appeal in January. The Serious Fraud Office, which brought the original prosecutions, concluded the convictions “may be considered unsafe” in light of the Hayes and Palombo judgment, and did not contest Wednesday’s appeals.
What happens next
Tom Bushnell, a partner at law firm Hickman & Rose, which represented Merchant, Mathew and Moryoussef, said it had taken “over a decade” to right the wrong in Merchant and Mathew’s case, and “over eight years” in Moryoussef’s. He said the men’s lives had been “turned upside down”.
With Wednesday’s ruling, nine of the City traders convicted over the rate-rigging scandal have now had their convictions overturned. Full legal reasons for the latest Court of Appeal decision are still to be published, and questions remain over what, if any, further accountability will follow for those involved in the original prosecutions.
