Financial Services

Jailed Barclays trader must pay £300,000 from Libor profits

Trader, who is serving a 5.5 year prison sentence for rigging Libor, must pay back nearly £300,000 in profits and legal costs that were considered proceeds from the crime

Jay Merchant, 47, reached a deal with prosecutors where he will pay £275,890 in so-called confiscation and an additional £21,961 in legal fees. The agreement with the Serious Fraud Office was disclosed at a London court hearing Tuesday. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire

Tue Dec 19 2017 - 12:22

A former Barclays Plc trader, who is serving a 5.5 year prison sentence for rigging Libor, must pay back nearly £300,000 in profits and legal costs that were considered proceeds from the crime.

Jay Merchant, 47, reached a deal with prosecutors where he will pay £275,890 in so-called confiscation and an additional £21,961 in legal fees. The agreement with the Serious Fraud Office was disclosed at a London court hearing Tuesday.

Merchant was one of four former Barclays traders sent to prison in 2016 for manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, used to value trillions of dollars of securities. He was sentenced to 6 1/2 years, which was reduced by a year on appeal.

The Libor scandal was a global investigation that saw a dozen firms pay about $9 billion in fines. Merchant, who received the longest sentence of the Barclays group, also has to pay the most money. Two more junior traders, Alex Pabon and Jonathan Mathew, were ordered to pay £2,300 and £34,700 pounds, respectively, earlier this year.

READ MORE

Peter Johnson, another senior Barclays trader who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to fouryears in prison, was forced to pay £144,501 in confiscation and costs. Merchant has 14 days to surrender the money. Merchant’s confiscation is the second-highest emanating from the UK investigation

.Former UBS Group AG trader Tom Hayes, the first person to be jailed for the offense and serving 11 years in prison, was ordered to pay £880,000 pounds in March 2016. In October, Hayes was granted permission by a London court to appeal part of the order related to the family's £1.9 million home.

A number of the Libor traders have sought to appeal their convictions. Pabon, who was released from prison earlier this year, is awaiting a judgment from the Court of Appeal, on whether his conviction should be overturned because an SFO witness has been discredited. Hayes and Mathew have both exhausted the court appeals available and referred their cases to the Criminal Cases Review Commission -- an organisation set up to investigate suspected miscarriages of justice.

Bloomberg

LATEST STORIES