Libor convictions collapse, leaving one Barclays whistleblower still jailed by ruling

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Highlights

Christian Bittar became the 18th banker to have a Libor conviction overturned, as years-long prosecutions continue to unravel after Tom Hayes' case.
Barclays whistleblower Johnson remains the only former banker still convicted on Libor charges, with his legal team now launching an appeal process.
Authorities' focus on Libor trader prosecutions, instead of senior bank executives or lowballing cases, fueled debate over the narrow and politically sensitive post-crisis accountability approach.

Appeal process follows wave of overturned rulings

As reported by Financial Times, former Deutsche Bank trader Christian Bittar became last month the 18th of 19 bankers imprisoned over alleged benchmark rate manipulation to have his conviction overturned, extending the unravelling of a years-long prosecution drive tied to Libor and Euribor.

The turning point came after Tom Hayes, the former UBS and Citigroup trader who was first convicted over Libor, had his conviction quashed last year. Supreme Court judges said there was "ample evidence" that might have supported a sound conviction, but they found that the 2015 verdict rested on unfair directions from the trial judge, a flaw that then affected later prosecutions.

Johnson, a veteran Barclays executive who helped trigger official scrutiny of benchmark submissions, is now the only convicted former banker in the Libor cases whose ruling remains in place. His lawyers have begun an appeal process.

Post-crisis accountability debate returns

The article argues that the Libor cases unfolded against intense public and political pressure for punishment after the 2008 financial crisis, even though senior bank chiefs in the U.S. and UK were not prosecuted over the broader banking collapse. Instead, authorities focused on traders involved in benchmark rate setting, an opaque but important part of financial market plumbing.

Johnson was central to Barclays' Libor submissions from September 2007 to late 2008 and raised concerns about "lowballing", or the submission of dishonestly low rates by other banks. He also felt pressure from senior Barclays managers and from figures in government and the Bank of England, who were worried that the bank's borrowing costs were out of line with peers during a period when confidence in the banking system was under severe strain.

U.S. and UK authorities later examined lowballing after the crisis but did not bring cases on that issue, shifting instead to alleged pre-crisis manipulation. In the UK, the Serious Fraud Office initially decided in 2012 not to pursue a Libor case, partly because of limited resources, before ringfenced funding allowed it to reverse course, a sequence that has fuelled claims that the narrow scope of prosecutions helped avoid scrutiny of politically sensitive conduct during the crisis.

In our earlier report on a Court of Appeal ruling in Malaysia, the judges held that a commission-based “commission partner” at a law firm can still be treated as a partner under the Partnership Act 1961 and therefore be liable for firm-related debts. The decision overturned two lower-court findings and signalled potentially broader consequences for how liability is assigned within professional partnerships and law-firm structures.

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