Former trader given 14 years prison over Libor scandal

Ex-trader Tom Hayes was sentenced to 14 years in jail by a London court on Monday after being found guilty of conspiring to rig Libor benchmark interest rates following a seven-year global investigation.

After a nine-week trial and seven days of deliberations, the jury of five women and seven men found Hayes, a 35-year-old former UBS and Citigroup trader, guilty of all eight counts of conspiracy to defraud.

"What this case has shown is the absence of that integrity which ought to characterize banking," Judge Jeremy Cooke Cooke said in announcing the verdict. "You, as a regulated banker, succumbed to temptation in an unregulated activity because you could."

In the first trial of a defendant accused of Libor rigging, Hayes had faced up to 10 years imprisonment for each count of conspiracy over the manipulation of London interbank offered rate (Libor), a crucial benchmark for around $450 trillion of financial contracts and consumer loans, between 2006 and 2010.

The London trial, which kicked off on May 26, marked a new phase in a seven-year, global inquiry that has led to 21 people being charged and some of the world's most powerful banks and brokerages paying around $9 billion in regulatory settlements.

Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) had alleged Hayes set up a network of brokers and traders spanning 10 leading financial institutions and cajoled or bribed them to help rig for profit rates designed to reflect the cost of inter-bank borrowing.

The prosecution said he simply ignored "red flags" as a global investigation into Libor rigging allegations, instigated by U.S. regulators at the height of the credit crisis in 2008, gathered momentum in 2009 and 2010.

Prosecutor Mukul Chawla said Hayes "behaved in a thoroughly dishonest and manipulative manner" and called him the ringmaster who told others what to do and rewarded them for their "dishonest assistance."

"The motive was a simple one: It was greed," he said.

Hayes said during his trial he had been transparent about trying to influence rates and that his managers were aware of and condoned trading methods that were common industry practice.

He said he received no training, that Libor was at the time unregulated, his requests for rate levels fell within a "permissible" range and that he left a trail of emails and computer chats because he didn't think he was doing anything wrong.

"[I was] either the stupidest fraudster ever because I wrote everything down, or there was an element of me that genuinely didn't think about it," Hayes has said in documents shown to the court. "I might be a lot of things, but I'm not stupid."

Citigroup and UBS both declined to comment on the guilty verdict.

During 82 hours of interviews with SFO investigators in the months following his arrest in December 2012, Hayes admitted dishonesty. But he told the court he had only confessed because he was desperate to be charged in Britain to avoid extradition to the United States, where he also faces fraud-related charges.

Hayes subsequently withdrew from a cooperation agreement with the SFO and pleaded not guilty in December 2013.

Wire services