Five Ex-Barclays Traders Have Libor Rate-Rigging Convictions Quashed by UK Court of Appeal

The UK Court of Appeal overturned the convictions of five former Barclays traders on October 7, 2026, in the latest and largest wave of reversals stemming from post-financial-crisis prosecutions over benchmark interest rate manipulation. Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon, and Colin Bermingham had each been convicted in landmark fraud trials for their roles in rigging Libor and related benchmark rates.

The ruling follows the quashing last year of the conviction of Tom Hayes, the former UBS and Citigroup trader whose 2015 guilty verdict on eight counts of conspiracy to defraud had been a cornerstone of the UK's rate-rigging prosecutions. That earlier reversal, driven in part by a US legal finding that traders had not broken any laws or rules by taking their banks' financial positions into account when submitting rates, effectively undermined the legal basis on which the British cases were built.

The five men were among roughly 19 traders convicted in the US and UK for manipulating Libor and Euribor, benchmark rates used to set borrowing costs on mortgages and financial contracts worth trillions of dollars globally. With these convictions now overturned, the decade-long legal campaign by UK and US prosecutors to hold individual traders criminally responsible for the rate-rigging scandal that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis has largely unravelled.