London quashes five more Barclays convictions in the Libor cases

The Court of Appeal in London on Wednesday quashed the convictions of five former Barclays traders for manipulating Libor and Euribor. Alex Pabon, Jay Vijay Merchant and Jonathan Mathew had been convicted of conspiracy to defraud in 2016 at Southwark Crown Court and sentenced to between two and six and a half years. Philippe Moryoussef was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to eight years. Colin Bermingham was convicted in 2019 and given five years. The Criminal Cases Review Commission had referred all five earlier this year, after receiving their applications in August 2025.

The referrals followed the Supreme Court's decision in July 2025 to quash the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo. Hayes, who had worked at UBS and Citigroup, was the first person a jury convicted over Libor rigging. He served five and a half years. Palombo, a former Barclays trader, had been convicted over Euribor. The Supreme Court found legal errors that made those verdicts unsafe. Wednesday's bench applied that finding to the five Barclays cases and praised the Commission's work in sending them back.

Who did which job

The roles are easy to blur and worth separating. Pabon and Merchant were Libor traders based in New York. Mathew was a Libor submitter and a junior trader based in London. Moryoussef was a senior trader in London. Bermingham, also in London, was responsible for Barclays' daily Euribor submissions, and he was convicted alongside Palombo. Libor was the average rate at which large London banks estimated they could borrow from one another. Euribor was the euro-area equivalent. Both underpinned trillions of dollars of contracts, from mortgages to swaps. Both are now replaced. Libor publication has ended.

Mathew, speaking after the ruling, said the stain of a conviction had been a burden every minute of the last ten years. That sentence is his. The Court's act was to set the verdicts aside, not to retry the question of whether traders asked submitters for favourable numbers. The Supreme Court's 2025 holding was about the directions given to juries, including how commercial practice and dishonesty were defined. A quashed conviction is not a finding that the conversations did not happen.

What the banks already paid

The criminal cases were the part the public saw. The money moved earlier, and in larger size. Barclays, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland and others paid billions of pounds and dollars in fines and settlements to US and British authorities between 2012 and 2015. Those regulatory outcomes are not reopened by a criminal appeal. A bank that signed a deferred prosecution agreement does not get the penalty back because a trader's jury direction is later found wanting.

The political use of the cases is also part of the record. Convictions of Hayes and the others became a stand-in for anger over the financial crisis, even though the crisis and the rate submissions were different events. Wednesday removes five more names from the list of people still carrying those verdicts. It does not return the fines. It does not rewrite the emails that regulators published in 2012.

Who is left

Hayes and Palombo are already clear. The five named on Wednesday are now clear. Other defendants in the British Libor and Euribor trials were acquitted at the time, or were not charged. The Commission route used here is open to anyone whose conviction rests on the same legal error. The Court of Appeal did not publish, in the accounts available on Wednesday, a remaining list. The practical effect is that the British criminal side of the scandal, which began with Hayes's verdict in 2015, has now lost its central convictions.

For the market, the benchmarks these men were accused of moving no longer exist in the form that was on trial. Contracts have moved to other rates. The judgment matters to the five men, to the Commission, and to any later case that used the same jury direction. It does not reopen a rate that has already been switched off.