Introduction
On 7 October 2026, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of five former Barclays traders, Alex Pabon, Jay Merchant and Jonathan Mathew, jailed in 2016 over Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) manipulation, along with Philippe Moryoussef and Colin Bermingham, convicted separately in 2018 and 2019 over Euribor, its euro equivalent. All five had been sentenced to up to eight years in prison following a Serious Fraud Office investigation that began in 2012, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Thus, one of Britain’s biggest white-collar prosecutions has collapsed, more than a decade after it first began.
What is Libor, and What Went Wrong
Libor was once the rate banks used to calculate what it would cost them to borrow from one another each day, a figure that fed into trillions of pounds worth of mortgages, loans and derivatives worldwide. Each morning, banks submitted their best estimate, and an average of those submissions became the official rate. The traders were accused of nudging their bank’s submissions up or down, not based on a genuine view of borrowing costs, but to benefit their own trading positions.
The Case That Changed Everything
The real turning point was not new evidence but a Supreme Court ruling in R v Hayes; R v Palombo [2025] UKSC 29, concerning two traders convicted in near-identical circumstances. At their trials, judges instructed juries that if a trader considered their own trading advantage when submitting a rate, that submission could not, as a matter of law, be genuine or honest. Think of it like a manager who decides, before even reading it, that an employee’s self-review must be dishonest simply because it might be biased in their opinions. The manager never actually asks whether the employee believed what they wrote; the assumption alone is treated as proof. That is essentially what the trial judges did: they told juries that a trader’s rate submission could not be honest if it also happened to benefit the trader, without ever letting the jury ask the real question, which is whether the trader actually believed the number they gave was fair. Once that error was confirmed, the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the Barclays five’s cases to the Court of Appeal, which reached the same conclusion for all of them.
A Verdict was Quashed, not Cleared
Crucially, none of this means the Court of Appeal believes the traders behaved properly. It simply means the trials that convicted them were unfair, which under English law is enough to make a conviction unsafe regardless of how strong the evidence looked. Two figures from the same scandal remain convicted for now: Christian Bittar, who pleaded guilty rather than stand trial, and Barclays whistle-blower Peter Johnson, both fighting appeals the SFO is actively contesting.
Conclusion
On one hand, this protects a core principle, that dishonesty is for a jury to decide, not a judge to assume, it’s something that protects everyone, not just bankers. On the contrary, five men whose banks’ submissions were shaped by self-interest are now free, a decade after a scandal that shook public trust in banking, which left many to ask whether justice has genuinely been served or simply delayed into irrelevance. Firms practicing white-collar crime, know that the ruling matters too, since it could shape how prosecutors draft jury directions for years to come.