Hayes was the fall guy as his bank bosses got off scot-free

The wheels of British justice are appallingly slow. Back in 2016, I wrote that the conviction of Tom Hayes, the bank trader jailed for conspiring to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), was unsafe. Yesterday, finally, the Supreme Court agreed to quash his conviction.

- CHRIS BLACKHURST

The case of Carlo Palombo, the other trader who had his conviction quashed, was not linked to Hayes. Palombo received four years in 2019. When ex-Citi and UBS banker Hayes was found guilty in 2015, he was sentenced to 14 years, an astonishingly long term for a white-collar criminal in this country. That was reduced to 11 years on appeal, but as I remarked at the time, you get less for killing someone.

There is no doubt he was being made an example of. There was considerable public anger - still is - at the way bankers had walked scot-free from the financial crisis, and Hayes was seen as a case that could discourage others.

He was portrayed as being at the centre of a web, setting the benchmark rate used for millions of personal loans; he was, therefore, the worst of the worst, an arch-villain who profited from ordinary folks; he, everyone seemed to agree, deserved every moment spent inside.

But in his case, there literally were no others. A year later, in a blow to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), which brought the prosecutions, six brokers were acquitted of conspiring with him to fix the interbank rate. On their acquittals, in his cell at HMP Lowdham Grange, Hayes could be forgiven for raging against the iniquity of a system that saw his life ruined.