Britain overturns 8 of 9 convictions in loan and mortgage rate case: loud scandal takes unexpected turn
More than a decade ago, British authorities sent top bank traders to prison for trying to influence interest rates that affected the terms of a huge number of loans, mortgages and financial contracts. Now almost all of those convictions have been overturned.
The latest to secure a review was former Deutsche Bank trader Christian Bittar. His case is especially unusual: in 2018 he himself pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years and four months in prison. But the Court of Appeal of England and Wales ruled that this conviction cannot be considered safe.
As a result, eight of the nine British criminal convictions in cases of manipulating LIBOR and EURIBOR rates have now been overturned.
Why this story is about more than just bank traders
LIBOR — the London Interbank Offered Rate — and EURIBOR, its European counterpart for euros, served for decades as benchmarks for the global financial system.
They were used in the calculation of interest rates on a vast number of contracts — from corporate loans and complex financial instruments to some mortgage and consumer loans.
Therefore, after the financial crisis, accusations of manipulating these benchmarks were seen not just as internal violations of banking rules.
They concerned rates that could ultimately affect real payments by companies and ordinary borrowers.
Bittar pleaded guilty — so why was his conviction overturned?
At first glance, that seems the strangest part of the new decision.
Christian Bittar not only lost at trial. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud in connection with the EURIBOR manipulation investigation.
However, a guilty plea does not make a conviction unassailable if the charge itself was based on a mistaken understanding of what the law requires the prosecution to prove.
And that exactly was the problem later discovered in a series of British cases.
The turning point came after a Supreme Court ruling
In July 2025, the UK Supreme Court considered the cases of former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes and former Barclays trader Carlo Palombo.
The court unanimously quashed their convictions and pointed to a fundamental error in the instructions given to juries at the original trials.
Juries had essentially been told: if a trader took into account the interests of his own position or his bank when choosing the rate he submitted, that rate could not be considered honest.
The Supreme Court ruled that that was not enough.
Commercial incentive alone does not prove fraud. Juries had to determine separately whether the trader submitted a rate he did not himself believe was correct, and whether he acted dishonestly in doing so.
That question had to be decided by juries on the evidence, not pre-empted by the judge through a misinterpretation of the law.
This does not mean the court found that no manipulation existed
There is an important legal nuance here.
The Supreme Court did not say the prosecution had no evidence.
On the contrary, the court noted that properly instructed juries could have reached a guilty verdict.
The problem was that the original trials had proceeded under an incorrect legal standard.
Thus, quashing convictions is not the same as concluding that the traders certainly did not try to influence rates. The court decided something different: guilty verdicts cannot be regarded as safe if the jury was wrongly instructed on precisely what had to be proved.
After that, convictions began to be overturned one after another
The Supreme Court’s decision opened the door to reviews of the remaining cases.
On 7 October 2026, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of five former Barclays traders who had been convicted between 2016 and 2019.
Two days later, Bittar’s conviction was also quashed.
Together with Hayes and Palombo, whose convictions were quashed earlier, this means that eight of the nine Britons convicted in these investigations have now had their convictions overturned.
Some of them spent years in prison.
Only one conviction remains
The last of the nine is the case of former Barclays employee Peter Johnson.
He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to manipulate LIBOR back in 2014.
Following decisions in the other traders’ cases, his lawyers are also seeking a review.
If that conviction is also quashed, one of Britain’s highest-profile campaigns against bank manipulation could end without a single surviving original conviction from the original group of cases.
The work of Britain’s anti-fraud agency has also been called into question
The investigations were led by the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO).
That is the body which for years built criminal cases against traders at major banks.
Following the Supreme Court ruling, the SFO did not contest the quashing of the convictions of five former Barclays employees.
But in Bittar’s case the agency took a different position and sought to uphold the conviction, relying in part on his own guilty plea.
The Court of Appeal disagreed.
After the ruling, the SFO said it had argued for a different outcome but respects the court’s decision.
How one mistake could survive so many trials
This story is now far bigger than the fate of one former Deutsche Bank trader.
It concerns a series of cases that for years were held up as an example of the state successfully fighting bank wrongdoing.
But it turned out that several of the trials were based on an erroneous legal interpretation. People were found guilty, handed lengthy sentences, appeals were rejected — and only years later did the highest court change the approach.
That is why the current series of quashed convictions raises a new question: not only whether the traders tried to manipulate the rates, but also how a single legal error could pass through so many trials and persist for more than a decade.
Sources: The Guardian, UK Supreme Court.