The Court of Appeal has quashed the conviction of Christian Bittar, a former Deutsche Bank trader who was jailed in 2018 for “manipulating” the benchmark interest rate Euribor, the BBC reports.
The decision lands days after the same UK court overturned five convictions handed to ex-Barclays bankers in the rate rigging trials.
Bittar followed the proceedings by video link from Switzerland because he was not granted a visa to attend court. Speaking to the BBC afterwards, he said: “I have waited a very, very long time for this day.”
“Finally the injustice of what I and others suffered has been recognised,” he said, adding that he was “so grateful for those who stood by me through this ordeal and those who worked so tirelessly to correct it.”
His wife Caroline, who lives in the UK, said the family had lost 15 “valuable years” and that their children had grown up “with this injustice”. She said they now looked forward to “enjoying life with our family and friends without this shadow hanging over us”.
Barclays traders cleared days earlier
On Wednesday, Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Alex Pabon, Colin Bermingham and Philippe Moryoussef had their convictions for “manipulating” the Libor and Euribor benchmarks quashed, following what the BBC described as a 10-year struggle for justice.
Their fresh appeals against their jail sentences followed a Supreme Court ruling last year that acquitted Tom Hayes, the first person jailed for “rigging” interest rates in 2015, and Carlo Palombo, who was jailed in 2019.
Hayes, initially sentenced to 14 years before this was reduced to 11 on appeal, is now seeking damages from his former employer UBS.
Only one former trader worldwide remains convicted: former Barclays trader Peter Johnson, who was also one of the original whistleblowers in the interest rate rigging scandal. He pleaded guilty on advice that he had little chance of winning at trial. The court confirmed that he too has now applied to appeal against his conviction.
Scapegoating claims and pressure on records
The outcome has already led lawyers and senior politicians to press the Bank of England and the Treasury to release all their records about their own roles in interest rate “rigging” during the financial crisis, amid concerns raised of a cover-up of the role of central banks and governments.
Former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis told the BBC the innocent traders had been the victims of a series of miscarriages of justice.
He said those exonerated this week and before were “the victims of a scapegoating exercise which arose as a result of the government’s own misbehaviour in lowballing [falsely understating] Libor interest rates themselves, in order to try and rescue the economy after their own self-induced crash in the late 2000s”.
How the legal ground shifted
In 2015, during the first trial for interest rate “rigging”, of former UBS trader Hayes, Mr Justice Jeremy Cooke decided as a matter of law that any attempt to influence the rates could not be lawful, and that any rate influenced by commercial interest must automatically be false. Judges in the subsequent eight trials followed suit.
In July 2025, however, the Supreme Court decided that all the judges had erred, misdirecting juries that it was wrong as a matter of law. Instead, whether the requests were right or wrong was properly a matter of fact for the jury to decide, not the judge.
All convictions in the United States were overturned in 2022 after an appeal court ruled that there was insufficient evidence that the traders’ requests had broken any rules or laws.
Background to the scandal
The financial crisis began in 2008, sending huge economic shockwaves across the world and triggering recessions in many countries. There was a public backlash against bankers, held by many to be responsible for the crisis, while the financial sector was protected by taxpayer-funded bailouts.
The Libor scandal erupted in 2012, when it was discovered that at the outbreak of the financial crisis, banks had been misrepresenting their positions during the process of setting the lending rate, helping to boost profits and mask difficulties.
Some 19 City traders were convicted in the US and UK between 2015 and 2019 across nine criminal trials held in London and New York. The traders were among 37 City traders and brokers prosecuted for “manipulating” the Libor and Euribor benchmarks, which track the cost of borrowing cash between banks and have been used to set interest rates on millions of mortgages and commercial loans.
The BBC has uncovered evidence of a much larger, state-led “rigging” of interest rates, under pressure from central banks and governments across the world. Evidence implicating Downing Street and the Bank of England was suppressed throughout the criminal trials.
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