Latest news with #convictionoverturned
Times
25-07-2025
- Business
- Times
Tom Hayes has industry ban dropped after rate-rigging appeal
Britain's financial regulator has ended its attempt to ban Tom Hayes from working in the financial services industry after the Supreme Court overturned a conviction of the former star trader associated with the Libor rigging scandal. The Financial Conduct Authority said on Friday that it would take no further action against Hayes, 45, the first trader ever jailed for interest rate rigging. The regulator also said that it would end a trading ban it previously imposed on Carlo Palombo, 46, a former Barclays trader who was separately sent to prison in 2019 following a trial for manipulating Euribor, another rate. Both former traders had their convictions overturned this week. • Love, Libor and loss: the Kafkaesque ordeal of Tom Hayes The UK Supreme Court unanimously allowed Hayes's appeal on Wednesday, quashing his 2015 conviction of eight counts of conspiracy to defraud by manipulating Libor, a now-defunct benchmark interest rate. Hayes, a former star trader at UBS and Citigroup, became the face of the affair when in 2015 he was sentenced to 14 years, reduced to 11 on appeal, after being convicted of rigging Libor. He spent about five and a half years in prison and had fought over the past decade to clear his name. Palombo was sentenced to four years in 2019 for manipulating Euribor and left prison in 2021. 'I always believed that it would happen,' Hayes said after the Supreme Court overturned his conviction. 'This wasn't a gamble for me.' The court quashed the conviction after deciding that the judge who presided over his trial misdirected the jury about a central element of the case. The judge had incorrectly said the jury was not allowed to consider commercial interests in the submissions, the Supreme Court said, and that 'undermined the fairness of the trial'. The traders argued that they were wrongly prosecuted for what were normal commercial practices in order to appease public anger towards the banking system over the 2008 financial crisis. The FCA had sought to ban Hayes from trading but the ban was postponed after the regulator was ordered by the Upper Tribunal to stay its move. The regulator said it was ending action against Hayes and overturning a ban on Palombo because the overturned convictions formed the basis upon which the regulator took its action.
Reuters
23-07-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Ex-trader Tom Hayes wins appeal to overturn rate-rigging conviction
LONDON, July 23 (Reuters) - Tom Hayes, the first trader ever jailed for interest rate rigging, had his conviction overturned by Britain's top court on Wednesday after a years-long fight to clear his name. The UK Supreme Court unanimously allowed Hayes' appeal, overturning his 2015 conviction of eight counts of conspiracy to defraud by manipulating Libor, a now-defunct benchmark interest rate. The court said there had been "ample evidence" for a jury to reasonably conclude Hayes had conspired with others to manipulate Libor submissions - much of it coming from Hayes' own interviews with Britain's Serious Fraud Office, which brought the charges against him. But the jury ten years ago was misdirected by the judge, the court said, and that "undermined the fairness of the trial". Supreme Court judge George Leggatt said Hayes was entitled to present his defence against allegations that he conspired to submit false information, including his insistence that he acted honestly, and to have those claims fairly considered by the jury. "He was deprived of that opportunity by directions which were legally inaccurate and unfair," the court said, adding that his convictions were "therefore unsafe and cannot stand." Hayes had initially received a 14-year prison sentence, later reduced to 11 years on appeal. He served five and a half years before being released on licence in 2021. A former star Citigroup (C.N), opens new tab and UBS (UBSG.S), opens new tab trader, Hayes became the face of the global Libor scandal and challenged his conviction during three days of hearings at the UK Supreme Court along with Carlo Palombo, 46, a former Barclays (BARC.L), opens new tab trader who was found guilty in 2019 of skewing Libor's euro equivalent, Euribor. The court also quashed Palombo's conviction. He was given a four-year sentence in 2019. The SFO said that after considering the judgment it would not be in the public interest for it to seek a retrial. Hayes and Palombo had argued that their convictions depended on a definition of Libor and Euribor which assumes there is an absolute legal bar on a bank's commercial interests being taken into account when setting rates. The Libor rate, phased out in 2023, was designed to reflect banks' short-term funding costs and based on daily estimates from a group of banks as to how much they would expect to pay to borrow funds from each other for a range of currencies and periods. Hayes' challenge at the Supreme Court followed a landmark U.S. court decision in 2022 that overturned the Libor rigging convictions of two former Deutsche Bank traders.
Associated Press
21-07-2025
- Associated Press
Appeals court orders new trial for man convicted in 1979 Etan Patz case
NEW YORK (AP) — The man convicted of killing 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979 was awarded a new trial Monday as a federal appeals court overturned the guilty verdict in one of the nation's most notorious missing child cases. Pedro Hernandez has been serving 25 years to life in prison since his 2017 conviction. He had been arrested in 2012 after a decadeslong, haunting search for answers in Etan's disappearance on the first day he was allowed to walk alone to his school bus stop. The appeals court overturned the conviction because of an issue involving how the trial judge handled a jury note during Hernandez 2017 trial — his second. His first trial ended in a jury deadlock in 2015. Hernandez was a teenager working at a convenience shop in Etan's Manhattan neighborhood when the boy vanished. Hernandez, who's from Maple Shade, New Jersey, later confessed to choking Etan. But his lawyers said he was mentally ill and his confession was false.
