Ex-barclays and Deutsche Bank traders jailed for rigging Euribor
TWO former traders have been jailed for more than 13 years for trying to rig a key financial benchmark at the height of the financial crisis.
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said 46-year-old Christian Bittar, who was once one of Deutsche Bank’s most profitable traders, and 50-year-old ex-barclays trader Phillipe Moryoussef had conspired to fix the Euro Interbank Offered rate (Euribor) for personal gain.
“Derivatives trading is often said to be a form of betting. You took the analogy one step further, by loading the dice,” said Judge Michael Gledhill when sentencing Mr Bittar.
“In my view, the reason for your offending came at least in part from the satisfaction of being able to beat the system, undetected for so many years, by manipulating the Euribor rate to your own trading advantage.”
Mr Bittar was sentenced to five years and four months at Southwark Crown Court, while Mr Moryoussef was sentenced to eight years.
The men were charged with trying to manipulate the rate between 2005 and 2009, after a long-running SFO investigation into Euribor rigging following its high-profile probe into the manipulation of the London interbank offered rate (Libor).
“Today’s result is the culmination of six years’ worth of investigation into rate-rigging so I would like to pay tribute to our team’s hard work,” said SFO director Mark Thompson.
However the jury did not reach a verdict on former Barclays bankers Carlo Palombo, Colin Bermingham and Sisse Bohart, who will be retried in January. Euribor is a key financial benchmark rate, which underpins around $180 trillion (£140 trillion) worth of financial products around the world.
Mr Thompson said earlier this month that the pair used to congratulate themselves in emails on “their apparent success. While gaming the system they spoke of the need to keep quiet about what they were doing and boast of the money they made from the scam”.
He pointed out that Mr Bittar was “very successful” in his own right, becoming a multi-millionaire through his job, so much so that Deutsche Bank did a deal with him to reduce his income “yet still felt the need to cheat”.
Mr Bittar’s lawyer David Savell said that “Christian and his family are looking forward to putting the case behind them and moving on with their lives”.
The charges come as lawyers for jailed former UBS trader Tom Hayes, the first person ever to be convicted of manipulating Libor, ramp up their fight to clear his name after it emerged that the SFO’S key witness asked a third party to “sanity check” his evidence report for any “howlers”.
Lawyers for former UBS trader Arif Hussein, who now runs a burger restaurant in London, are also trying to get the Swiss bank to cough up around £500,000 to cover his legal fees after a tribunal described his case as “troubling”.
Barclays became the first bank to be fined for its role in the Libor scandal, paying £290m in 2012, while Deutsche Bank was forced to fire seven staff and pay a £1.7bn fine for its role in the scandal in 2015. Deutsche Bank and Barclays declined to comment.