London Court Overturns Five Barclays Rate-Rigging Convictions

On 7 Oct 2026, the Court of Appeal in London quashed the convictions of five former Barclays traders jailed for rigging Libor and Euribor. The Guardian

Libor and Euribor are benchmark interest rates that help set borrowing costs across the financial system. The five are Jay Vijay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon and Colin Bermingham. All worked at Barclays. They were jailed between 2016 and 2019 for manipulating Euribor or Libor.

In 2016, Merchant, Mathew and Pabon were convicted of conspiracy to defraud for manipulating Libor. That charge covers an agreement by two or more people to act dishonestly to cause loss. Reuters

The cases returned to court after a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission in January 2026. The Commission is an independent body that sends cases back to appeal when a legal issue may have made a conviction unsafe.

The Serious Fraud Office, the agency that brought the original prosecutions, told the court the convictions may be considered unsafe. It did not contest the appeals.

The appeals turned on UK Supreme Court decisions from July 2025 quashing the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo. The court ruled unanimously in Hayes's case. In both cases it held the defendants were deprived of a fair trial because trial judges gave juries inaccurate and unfair directions on the legal test for dishonesty. Reuters

Hayes, a former UBS and Citigroup trader, was the first banker jailed for Libor-rigging in 2015, convicted on eight counts of conspiracy to defraud. Palombo, also a former Barclays trader, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2019 for rigging Euribor. Both had their convictions quashed on the same day in July 2025.

The broader context here is procedure rather than new evidence. The Supreme Court did not retry the trading evidence. It held the jury directions on dishonesty were inaccurate and unfair. Once that flaw was set out in Hayes and Palombo, verdicts resting on the same directions were difficult to defend.

Looking at what this means for the docket as a whole, the 7 Oct 2026 rulings close the Barclays tranche that followed Hayes. Five convictions, entered between 2016 and 2019 across Libor and Euribor allegations, have now fallen on the same legal ground. The January 2026 Commission referral provided the route back, and the decision not to contest decided the result.

In my view, practitioners who handle historic conspiracy to defraud cases will pay close attention. When appeal courts revisit how juries are told to test dishonesty, the effect often reaches beyond one defendant. Here, unanimous reasoning in one appeal set the pattern for five more, without fresh fact-finding.