A London court of appeal overturned convictions against five former Barclays employees on Wednesday, finding their guilty verdicts unsafe. The traders—Jay Vijay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon, and Colin Bermingham—had been imprisoned between 2016 and 2019 for manipulating the euro interbank offered rate (Euribor) or the London interbank offered rate (Libor). These benchmarks influenced the pricing of financial products affecting pensions, mortgages, and savings globally, with the schemes allegedly impacting trillions of pounds and euros.
The acquittals arrived just over a year after the UK supreme court cleared Tom Hayes, a former UBS and Citigroup trader, in 2015. That landmark decision identified flaws in the original trial proceedings, determining that judges had provided juries with “inaccurate and unfair” guidance that compromised the defendants’ right to fair trials. Following Hayes’ exoneration, Carlo Palombo, a former Barclays trader convicted in 2019, also had his conviction quashed in July 2025.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the five Barclays traders’ cases to the appeals court in January after the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), which originally prosecuted them, determined their convictions “may be considered unsafe” in light of the supreme court’s findings. The SFO did not contest the current appeals. The traders and their legal representatives described the decade-long process as deeply damaging, with one noting that correcting the record represented validation that an injustice had occurred.
The ruling represents another setback for the SFO’s high-profile prosecutions. The agency stated that while the supreme court had found sufficient evidence for properly instructed juries to potentially convict Hayes and Palombo, it determined retrials would not serve the public interest. A separate appeal by Christian Bittar, a former Deutsche Bank trader who pleaded guilty in 2018, was scheduled for hearing on Friday, with the SFO continuing to contest his case on grounds that his conviction remains secure.
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