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LONDON - Tom Hayes, the first trader ever jailed for interest rate rigging, had his conviction overturned by Britain's top court on Wednesday after a years-long fight to clear his name.
The UK Supreme Court unanimously allowed Hayes' appeal, overturning his 2015 conviction of eight counts of conspiracy to defraud by manipulating Libor, a now-defunct benchmark interest rate.
Hayes had initially received a 14-year prison sentence, later reduced to 11 years on appeal. He served five and a half years before being released on licence in 2021.
A former star Citigroup and UBS trader, Hayes became the face of the global Libor scandal and challenged his conviction during three days of hearings at the UK Supreme Court along with Carlo Palombo, 46, a former Barclays trader who was found guilty in 2019 of skewing Libor's euro equivalent, Euribor.
The court also quashed Palombo's conviction. He was given a four-year sentence in 2019.
Hayes and Palombo had argued that their convictions depended on a definition of Libor and Euribor which assumes there is an absolute legal bar on a bank's commercial interests being taken into account when setting rates.
The Libor rate, phased out in 2023, was designed to reflect banks' short-term funding costs and based on daily estimates from a group of banks as to how much they would expect to pay to borrow funds from each other for a range of currencies and periods.
Hayes' challenge at the Supreme Court followed a landmark U.S. court decision in 2022 which overturned the Libor rigging convictions of two former Deutsche Bank traders.
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