Ex-Deutsche Bank trader jailed for rigging rates has conviction overturned

Ex-Deutsche Bank trader jailed for rigging rates has conviction overturned

Another former banker sentenced in one of the biggest scandals of the financial crisis has had his conviction overturned after a lengthy legal fight.

The Court of Appeal has quashed the conviction of Christian Bittar, a former Deutsche Bank trader who was sent to prison in 2018 for "manipulating" the benchmark interest rate, Euribor.

This follows the same UK court overturning five convictions of ex-Barclays bankers in the rate-rigging cases earlier this week.

Bittar, who followed the hearing by video link from Switzerland because he was not given a visa to appear in court, told the BBC: "I have waited a very, very long time for this day."

The financial crisis started in 2008, causing major economic shockwaves around the world and pushing many countries into recession.

There was a public backlash against bankers, whom many blamed for the crisis, while the financial sector was shielded by taxpayer-funded bailouts.

The Libor scandal broke in 2012, when it emerged that at the start of the financial crisis, banks had been misrepresenting their positions during the process of setting the lending rate, helping to increase profits and conceal problems.

A total of 19 City traders were convicted in the US and UK between 2015 and 2019 across nine criminal trials in London and New York.

Eighteen of them have now been acquitted.

Only one former trader in the world remains convicted: former Barclays trader Peter Johnson, who was also one of the original whistleblowers in the interest-rate rigging scandal. He pleaded guilty on advice that he had little chance of winning at trial. The court confirmed that he too has now applied to appeal against his conviction.

The news has already led lawyers and senior politicians to urge the Bank of England and the Treasury to release all their records about their own roles in interest rate 'rigging' during the financial crisis, amid concerns about a cover-up of the role of central banks and governments.

After his conviction was quashed, Bittar said: "Finally the injustice of what I and others suffered has been recognised.

"I am so grateful for those who stood by me through this ordeal and those who worked so tirelessly to correct it."

His wife, Caroline, who lives in the UK, said the family had lost 15 "valuable years", with their children "growing up with this injustice".

She added that they were looking forward to "enjoying life with our family and friends without this shadow hanging over us".

On Wednesday, Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew, Alex Pabon, Colin Bermingham and Philippe Mouryoussef saw their convictions for 'manipulating' the interest rate benchmarks Libor and Euribor quashed after a 10-year struggle for justice.

They filed fresh appeals against their prison sentences after a Supreme Court ruling last year that cleared Tom Hayes, the first person jailed for 'rigging' interest rates in 2015, and Carlo Palombo, jailed in 2019.

Tom Hayes, who was originally sentenced to 14 years and had that reduced on appeal to 11, is now seeking damages from his former employer UBS.

The traders were among 37 City traders and brokers prosecuted for "manipulating" the interest rate benchmarks Libor and Euribor, which measure the cost of borrowing cash between banks and have been used to set interest rates on millions of mortgages and commercial loans.

The BBC has uncovered evidence of a much larger, state-led 'rigging' of interest rates, under pressure from central banks and governments around the world. Evidence implicating Downing Street and the Bank of England was suppressed throughout the criminal trials.

Former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis told the BBC the innocent traders had been victims of a series of miscarriages of justice.

He said the people exonerated this week and before were "the victims of a scapegoating exercise which arose as a result of the government's own misbehaviour in lowballing [falsely understating] Libor interest rates themselves, in order to try and rescue the economy after their own self-induced crash in the late 2000s".

In 2015, during the first trial over interest rate 'rigging', involving former UBS trader Hayes, Mr Justice Jeremy Cooke ruled as a matter of law that any attempt to influence the rates could not be lawful, and that any rate influenced by commercial interest must automatically be false. Judges in the following eight trials adopted the same approach.

However, in July 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that all the judges had been wrong, and had misdirected juries by saying that this was wrong as a matter of law. Instead, whether the requests were right or wrong was properly a matter of fact for the jury to decide, not the judge.

All convictions in the United States were overturned in 2022 after an appeal court ruled there was insufficient evidence that the traders' requests had broken any rules or laws.