Supreme Court quashes IBOR convictions

The SFO will not be seeking a retrial of 2 individuals it had started to investigate 13 years ago and who have now had their convictions quashed by the Supreme Court. The 2 traders had been accused of conspiring with others to manipulate, respectively, LIBOR and EURIBOR rates. The individuals had appealed, and failed on appeal, but in 2023 the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the convictions back to the Court of Appeal following similar cases being decided differently in the US which had led to convictions being quashed and charges dropped there. The appellants claimed, as they had before, that the judge’s directions to the jury were wrong in law, but the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeals on the basis that this argument did not relate to the reason for the reference and should therefore not be allowed – and it had already considered and rejected this argument. However, it did say that it was important to determine whether as a matter of law on the proper construction of the LIBOR and EURIBOR definitions:

• if a submission is influenced by trading advantage, it is therefore not a genuine or honest answer to the question posed by the definitions; and
• the submission must be an assessment of the single cheapest rate rather than a selection from within the range.

The Supreme Court held the answer to both questions was “no”, allowed both appeals and quashed the convictions. It said the question was posed by the definition was a matter of opinion and therefore the submission of a rate could only be false or misleading if it did not represent the submitter’s actual opinion. It said that question of fact was what a jury should decided, not a judge. It said there was ample evidence on which a jury could have reached a guilty finding if properly directed but the errors made in both cases, although different, had the essential error of treating a question of fact as if it were a matter of law. For this and some other reasons, both convictions had to be quashed.

The SFO says it would not be in the public interest to seek a retrial of the individuals.