The Vacation of Tom Hayes’s Conviction (Part 2 of our two-part discussion)

This is Part 2 of our two-part discussion with Tom Hayes, the now vindicated former English banker, who we first spoke with in April 2025.  At the time of that earlier discussion with Tom, in Part 1 of this series, Tom was awaiting a decision of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court on the appeal of his August 2015 conviction, arising from his work submitting rates, on behalf of his employer, a bank, that were used to determine the London Interbank Offered Rate (or, LIBOR)—a benchmark rate, to which many other financial instruments were connected.

The allegation was that Tom, and others, had manipulated their submission of rates to benefit the financial institutions they worked for.  For that conduct—what the prosecution characterized as a “manipulation” of LIBOR—Tom was sentenced to 14 years in prison, subsequently reduced to 11 years in prison, of which he ultimately served about 5. 

But a parallel prosecution in the United States against two other traders, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, was dismissed, following a favorable decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2022.  At the time of our discussion with Tom in Part 1, the United Kingdom remained the only jurisdiction that viewed Tom’s conduct as criminal.  That is, until his conviction—and the conviction of another trader, Carlo Palumbo—were overturned by a unanimous UK Supreme Court on July 23, 2025.  We caught up with Tom after this tremendous reprieve.