The Court of Appeal on Friday quashed the conviction of Christian Bittar, the former Deutsche Bank trader who was jailed in Britain in 2018 for conspiring to rig the Euribor benchmark interest rate, in a ruling that accelerates the unravelling of the prosecutions that defined the post-crisis era.
The decision came two days after the same court overturned the convictions of five former Barclays traders: Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Alex Pabon, Colin Bermingham and Philippe Moryoussef. Both cases were prosecuted by the Serious Fraud Office, and both collapsed under the weight of last year's Supreme Court judgment in the cases of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, which found that trial judges had misdirected juries on what the law required them to prove.
The SFO had contested Mr Bittar's appeal, arguing that his conviction remained safe despite the change in the legal landscape. The court disagreed.
The Unravelling at a Glance
- Christian Bittar's 2018 Euribor conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal on Friday.
- On Wednesday, five former Barclays traders had their convictions overturned by the same court.
- The appeals follow the Supreme Court's July 2025 ruling in favour of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo.
- The Supreme Court found trial judges had misdirected juries in the benchmark rate cases.
- The prosecutions concerned the Libor and Euribor interest rate benchmarks.
- Attention now turns to the pending appeal of Peter Johnson, who pleaded guilty under the old approach.
A prosecution strategy in retreat
The Libor and Euribor prosecutions were once presented as the definitive accountability for the financial crisis: traders marched into the dock for manipulating the benchmarks that underpin trillions of pounds of loans and derivatives. Mr Hayes, the former UBS trader who became the face of the scandal, served five and a half years of an eleven-year sentence before the Supreme Court cleared him.
Friday's ruling raises the count of quashed convictions still further and intensifies scrutiny of how the SFO conducted the trials. The agency said it respected the court's decision and remained committed to its work, but its critics sense a wider reckoning. Campaigners have renewed calls for the release of Bank of England and Treasury records from the period, amid longstanding allegations, unproven, that lowballing of rate submissions was encouraged by officials during the crisis.
What happens next
One case stands apart. Peter Johnson, a former Barclays trader who pleaded guilty rather than face trial, has an appeal pending that will test whether a guilty plea entered under the discredited legal approach can itself be revisited. A ruling in his favour could open the door to challenges the courts have so far been reluctant to entertain.
For the men cleared this week, the judgments close chapters that have consumed more than a decade of their lives. For the criminal justice system, they leave an uncomfortable ledger: years of imprisonment imposed for conduct that, on the Supreme Court's reading of the law, juries were never properly asked to judge.