Three Ex-Barclays Traders Found Guilty Of Fraud In Libor Trial

Three former Barclays traders have been found guilty by a London jury of conspiring to fraudulently manipulate global benchmark interest rates in a stark warning to junior bankers and a major victory for Britain’s Serious Fraud Office.

Jonathan Mathew (35), a Libor submitter, along with traders Jay Merchant (45) and Alex Pabon (37), were found guilty of conspiring with others at Barclays to manipulate USA dollar Libor – the benchmark interbank lending rate – for more than two years, until September 2007.

Jay Merchant, 45, Jonathan Mathew, 35, and Alex Pabon, 38, were found to have conspired to defraud the U.S. dollar Libor at Southwark Crown Court.

The news is out after restrictions on reporting the cases were lifted as the jury failed to agree a verdict on two other defendants.

British and United States regulators fined Barclays £290 million over the scandal in 2012.

Merchant, Mr. Pabon, Mr. Reich and Mr. Contogoulas to Barclays’s Libor submitters, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Mathew. British prosecutors have 14 days from Monday to consider whether to seek a re-trial of Contogoulas and Reich. Peter Johnson, a senior submitter, pleaded guilty before the trial began.

Johnson, Mathew, Merchant and Pabon will be sentenced in a two-day hearing beginning on 6 July. He is serving an 11-year prison sentence, and has been ordered to pay a $1.24 million penalty.

In January a United Kingdom jury acquitted six City brokers who were alleged to have helped manipulate the Libor, just months after the high profile conviction of former banker Tom Hayes.

This brings to five the number of convictions as a result of the SFO’s investigation. The messages showed that the four traders had requested rates that would benefit their trading books, and that Mr. Mathew at least in some cases complied, but the men and their lawyers told the court they had acted honestly and with the knowledge of their bosses.

Tom Hayes, a former trader for UBS and Citigroup, became the first banker convicted as part of the Libor scandal.

Jurors concluded that Mathew, from Shenfield, Essex, and Merchant and Pabon, who both live in the U.S., acted dishonestly and convicted them of conspiracy to defraud.