What does the overturning of a City trader's fraud conviction mean for deregulation?

Independent

a day ago

Tom Hayes, the former City trader who was jailed in 2015 for his part in rigging inter-bank interest rates, the so-called Libor scandal – was a patsy.
The former UBS and Citigroup trader was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison, later reduced to 11. This week, that conviction was quashed by the Supreme Court.
I'm all for white collar criminals getting their just desserts, but Hayes' penalty always seemed more than a little excessive. It is more than twice what the rogue trader Nick Leeson got for bringing down Barings Bank.
However, proportionality never came into this. Hayes' trial was designed to deliver a head on a plate to a public that was justifiably angry about what the City was getting up to after the bankers nearly crashed the economy.
There was a widespread feeling that overpaid boys – and they were mostly boys – with massively inflated egos and little sense of morality were thumbing their noses at the rest of Britain, which was just starting to feel the impact of the then-government's austerity policies.
But Hayes, who ended up serving five-and-a-half years, had nothing to do with that crisis, and contributed not a whit to austerity.
Libor – the interest rate at which key banks were willing to lend unsecured loans to each other – was unregulated at the time, which also wasn't Hayes' fault, but rather an issue for the politicians and regulators who were asleep at the wheel.
It did ultimately set the rate for a number of loans, including some mortgages, but the day-to-day activities of Hayes and his peers didn't have much effect on what ordinary borrowers paid. No one was able to convincingly show any, otherwise we would have seen a string of compensation claims.
The chief losers were likely other trading desks, which were often playing the same game anyway. That's not to justify what went on. Cheating is still cheating, and the whole business knocked confidence in the City and its markets.
But, then, the whole system was a joke.
'Tom Hayes' penalty always seemed more than a little excessive. It is more than twice what the rogue trader Nick Leeson got for bringing down Barings Bank' (PA Wire)
Libor was set based on what some rube at Bank A estimated would be their cost of borrowing from other banks. These were put together, and a daily rate declared. If a hotshot trader got in touch, suggesting that the Libor guy tweak their Tuesday submission to help their trading position, they tended to comply. This is how the scandal got going.
Needless to say, all this was unregulated. Yes, you read that right. Stupid is as stupid does, and this was really stupid. The Financial Services Authority, which was then the City's chief watchdog, ended up using failings in systems and controls and violations of its principles of business to justify the chunky fines it ultimately levied on the banks involved.
Back to Hayes: the Supreme Court didn't completely exonerate him. It said there was 'ample evidence' during the trial that could have led to a conviction. But the judges raised issues with the trial judge's summing up, the directions given to the jury, and the impact it had on Hayes' defence. This was deemed to be unfair and the conviction unsafe as a result.
It wouldn't be a surprise to see the other seven convicted traders up next. Similar cases have also been quashed in the US. The whole deck of cards is collapsing.
The Serious Fraud Office said it would not seek to re-try Hayes or Carlo Palombo, another former trader, at Barclays, who received a four-year sentence for manipulating another benchmarked interest rate, Euribor, but has also won his appeal. They've done their time, and it's unlikely that the taxpayer will be coughing up any compo. Best sweep this one under the carpet because who wants all that stupid aired in public again, right?
Here's the problem. The government had promised to deregulate financial services in the hope that reducing its oversight of the financial sector would light a fire under the City of London, boost the UK's stalling economy and bring in the tax revenues that the Treasury is in dire need of.
This will likely involve loosening the rules governing the conduct of senior bankers that were ushered in following the 2008 credit crunch and the wave of scandals that followed in its wake, including interest-rate fixing.
Can you see the problem with that? I think Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, can. Earlier this week, he advised the Treasury select committee that any big reforms to dramatically loosen City regulation – what the chancellor Rachel Reeves described in her Mansion House speech as a "boot on the neck" of business – and encourage more risk-taking might actually do more harm than good. He hinted that it might even trigger another financial meltdown.
If traders can find an edge, an opening, they will jump on it. It was ever thus. They had good reason to think they had with Libor and that they were okay because there weren't any proper rules in place at the time.
Their bosses will either turn a blind eye, just as they did then, or quietly encourage it, especially if the numbers come up good. And when this results in another scandal, there will be fines, which banks see as the cost of doing business, and an attempt to find another Tom Hayes to carry the can.
The supervising bosses, who do the hiring and set the culture and who are supposed to be on top of what their banks are up to, will ride out the storm and pocket their bonuses as they always have.
Justice, of a sort, has been served this time. But as for all that talk we heard about lessons being learned? They never are.