Court quashes five former Barclays traders’ convictions

The Court of Appeal in London quashed the fraud convictions of five former Barclays traders on Wednesday, October 7, overturning cases tied to the manipulation of Libor and Euribor benchmark interest rates. The traders are Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Alex Pabon and Colin Bermingham. The court had not yet published its full reasons for the decision. The five were sentenced between 2016 and 2019 for offences connected to the benchmark rates, which were used to set borrowing costs on financial products including loans and mortgages. The ruling followed the Supreme Court’s decision in July 2025 to quash the convictions of former traders Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo. The Court of Appeal’s detailed reasoning in the five cases remained unclear at the time of the ruling. The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the five cases to the Court of Appeal in January 2026, after the Supreme Court decision prompted renewed scrutiny of the earlier prosecutions. Lawyers for the traders argued that the jury instructions in their trials were materially similar to those in the Hayes and Palombo cases, where the Supreme Court found the instructions inaccurate.