Response to Supreme Court judgment

The Serious Fraud Office investigates and prosecutes the most complex fraud, bribery and corruption cases affecting the UK and the safety of our economy. 

Today’s Supreme Court decision comes thirteen years after we first investigated the practice used by some traders and submitters at selected banks to influence key benchmark rates of interest in financial markets.

These rates were called the London Inter-bank Offered Rate (“LIBOR”) and the Euro Inter-bank Offered Rate (“EURIBOR”) and they affected the value of hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of financial products around the world, including ordinary people’s pensions, mortgages and savings.

Our investigation led to nine convictions of senior bankers for fraud offences, with two of these individuals pleading guilty and seven found guilty by juries. 

This judgment has determined that the legal directions given by the judge to the jury at the conclusion of trial were incorrect in Hayes’ and Palombo’s trials and for that reason their convictions have today been found unsafe.

We have considered this judgment and the full circumstances carefully and determined it would not be in the public interest for us to seek a retrial.

We have a duty, as a prosecutor, to inform past defendants about any development that could affect their conviction.  

At this point, we have made an assessment on six individuals.  

We consider that, in five instances, the circumstances that led to Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo’s appeals being upheld by the Supreme Court could apply to them too. 

We consider that the jury directions, given at Hayes’ and subsequently Palombo’s trial and which were the basis of the court’s judgment, may apply to Jonathan Mathew, Jay Merchant, Alex Pabon, Philippe Moryoussef and Colin Bermingham’s trials. Therefore, their convictions may be considered unsafe. 

For one individual, Peter Johnson, we have considered the judgment in respect of his guilty plea, and we consider that the conviction is safe.