SFO's Libor prosecutions lose five more Barclays convictions at the Court of Appeal

"The Supreme Court found that there was ample evidence on which a properly directed jury could have convicted Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo. We deemed it was not in the public interest to seek retrials of these two individuals," Jason Williams, head of division at the SFO, said ^[14]. On the Barclays five, he said: "After carefully considering this judgment and the full circumstances we do not oppose the appeals of five individuals convicted by juries in relation to Libor and Euribor. We communicated our decision last year to each of the people affected by the judgment." ^[5] The SFO made that decision before the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the cases in January ^[18].

Tom Bushnell, the Hickman & Rose partner who represented the traders, made the critic's case. The SFO "must reflect on how its repeated failure to ensure these trials were conducted fairly contributed to the collapse of its most significant series of prosecutions of the past fifteen years," he said ^[13]. He also said the ruling "recognises that this error went on to be repeated in the other Libor/ Euribor prosecutions" ^[12]. Williams closed on the office's future work. The SFO "remains committed to pursuing the most serious cases of fraud, bribery and corruption," he said ^[15].

For compliance teams, the record so far points at the trials. Williams's own phrase, a "properly directed jury", puts the Hayes and Palombo problem in the directions the jury was given ^[14]. Bushnell's complaint is about how fairly the trials were run ^[13]. The coverage does not describe the evidence the juries heard, so it cannot show whether internal chat messages or any other material were the weak point. On this record, any lesson about the reliability of chat-log evidence would run ahead of the facts. In my view, the SFO's confidence in its evidence also counts for less than it sounds. Its claim that a properly directed jury could have convicted Hayes and Palombo will not be tested, because it chose not to retry them ^[14].

The prosecutions were brought more than a decade ago ^[6]. Prosecutors cast the traders as a symbol of banker greed during the public anger over the 2008 financial crisis, the BBC reported ^[17]. Counting Hayes and Palombo, seven former traders have now had their convictions quashed across the two rulings ^[19]. "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," Jonathan Mathew, one of the five, said ^[9]. Barclays declined to comment ^[16].