The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) today issued a brief update on its prosecution against traders accused of rigging LIBOR and EURIBOR.

Today the Court of Appeal overturned the convictions of Jonathan Mathew, Jay Merchant, Alex Pabon, Philippe Moryoussef and Colin Bermingham.

The case follows the Supreme Court’s judgment in the appeals of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, which related to the legal directions given to juries in LIBOR and EURIBOR prosecutions.

Following consideration of that judgment, the Serious Fraud Office did not oppose the appeals of five defendants convicted following trial.

Jason Williams, Head of Division at the Serious Fraud Office, said:

“The Supreme Court found that there was ample evidence on which a properly directed jury could have convicted Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo. We deemed it was not in the public interest to seek retrials of these two individuals.

After carefully considering this judgment and the full circumstances we did not oppose the appeals of five individuals convicted by juries in relation to Libor and Euribor. We communicated our decision last year to each of the people affected by the judgment.

The SFO remains committed to pursuing the most serious cases of fraud, bribery and corruption”.

In its prosecution launched more than a decade ago, the SFO investigated the practice used by some traders and submitters at selected banks to influence key benchmark rates of interest in financial markets.

These rates were called the London Inter-bank Offered Rate (“LIBOR”) and the Euro Inter-bank Offered Rate (“EURIBOR”) and they affected the value of hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of financial products around the world, including ordinary people’s pensions, mortgages and savings.