Out of jail, banker who served five years over rate-rigging scandal
THE FIRST banker convicted in the Libor interest rate scandal was reunited with his family yesterday after more than five years in jail.
Tom Hayes hugged wife Sarah Tighe and nine-year-old son Joshua and said he planned to spend his first evening of freedom enjoying a doner kebab.
The 41-year-old former UBS and Citigroup trader was convicted in 2015 of rigging the Libor rate, which is used for lending between banks. His initial sentence of 14 years was cut to 11 years, half of which he served.
Following his release from Ford open prison in West Sussex yesterday he insisted he was innocent, adding: ‘My eight-year ordeal in the UK is almost over.
‘My original sentence was longer than those recently imposed on four of the seven people implicated in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese immigrants. I still now face a criminal complaint in the US.
‘I have been released from prison after being sentenced to 11 years for following bank practice and doing my job the way I was asked to. However, today I begin the
‘A scapegoat with a disability’
process of rebuilding my life and my shattered relationship with my son, Joshua, and I’m going to enjoy my first doner kebab in a long time.’
The former yen derivatives trader is fighting to have his fraud conviction overturned on the grounds that he was a scapegoat for senior colleagues. His case is with the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Hayes, who is mildly autistic, was paid £1.3million in three years at UBS before leaving for Citi, where he was paid £3.5million in the nine months before the scandal broke.
His solicitor Karen Todner said: ‘Tom’s autism was only diagnosed shortly before his trial, the jury were not made aware of it and no medical evidence was allowed to be called in his defence.
‘Tom has undoubtedly been a scapegoat for those more senior to him – and what’s more, a scapegoat with a disability.’
The Serious Fraud Office insisted at his trial that Hayes was the ‘ringmaster’ of the Libor-rigging affair, claiming that his ‘greed’ drove him to chase higher profits. The scandal rocked global markets in 2008-9 because Libor sets the price of so many financial products, including mortgages and loans. The SFO finally closed its investigation last October, after securing five convictions including that of Hayes. His wife, who is a corporate lawyer, was forced to sell the couple’s seven-bedroom country house in Hampshire.
Hayes, who was given a £852,561 confiscation order as part of his sentence, had sold his share in the property to his wife for £250,000 to help pay legal bills. She sold the house for £1.63million in 2016 to pay off the confiscation order.