Barclays Rate-Rigging Convictions Fall in London

A London court has overturned the convictions of five former Barclays traders on rate-rigging charges, according to Bloomberg.

The ruling closes what had been one of the higher-profile criminal prosecutions to emerge from the post-2008 LIBOR scandal — a years-long enforcement effort by the Serious Fraud Office that secured convictions against a number of traders across several banks, only to watch many of those convictions encounter difficulty on appeal. The Bloomberg report confirms the outcome but does not specify the grounds on which the court acted.

That gap matters. An appellate court overturning a conviction can do so on the narrow procedural question of how the jury was directed, on the sufficiency of the evidence, or on the legal definition of the underlying offence — and each carries a different implication for whether the underlying conduct was lawful, merely unprovable, or prosecuted on a flawed theory. The SFO's LIBOR cases were challenged on all three fronts at various points, and the specific ground here has not yet been reported.

What is established: five men who entered these proceedings as convicted criminals no longer are. Whether the Crown Prosecution Service or SFO has any remaining path — a retrial, a further charge — is not addressed by the source. A decade of enforcement, and the question of what rate-rigging actually is in English criminal law, may still not have a final answer.