In a landmark case, a 35-year-old derivatives trader, who had worked for UBS and Citigroup, was today jailed for 14 years by a UK court for fixing the rate of interest at which banks lend to each other, known as Libor rate.
After a nine-week trial at London's Southwark Crown Court, Tom Hayes was convicted of eight counts of conspiracy to defraud between 2006 and 2010, when he worked for Swiss bank UBS and its US rival Citigroup as yen derivatives trader.
The British national is the first person to be convicted by a British jury of rigging the benchmark Libor inter-bank lending rate.
Hayes, who was arrested in December 2012 and questioned by the UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO), was the first person to face trial after a global investigation into the rate-rigging scandal.
The SFO said that Hayes bribed traders across 10 lenders into fixing the Libor rate so he could make a profit in a bid to boost his own salary and bonus of up to seven figures.
Libor rate is an interest rate used by banks around the world to set the price of financial products worth trillions of pounds.
Even minor movements in the rate can result in bumper profits for a trader manipulating the rates.
Hayes told the court that the manipulation was widespread.
