UBS staff knew of Libor fixing, former trader tells trial

Tom Hayes, the first person to face trial in the global investigation into the fixing of Libor, has admitted he asked colleagues at UBS as well as traders and brokers at other firms to help him rig the benchmark lending rate.

But the British former trader insisted on the first day of his defence that his managers were fully aware of what he was doing. Taking the stand at Southwark Crown Court in London, he said: “Everything I did was with complete transparency. Everything I did my managers knew about . . . sometimes going up all the way to the CEO.”

Mr Hayes testified that he confessed to the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) because he was desperate to be charged and avoid extradition to the US. When he was charged by the US, he had already been arrested by the SFO.

“I knew that being arrested was not enough to stop the extradition process,” he said. “At the time I didn’t think about innocence, guilt; my only concern was getting charged and avoiding extradition.”

Mr Hayes (35) said he did not act dishonestly and that there were no rules or policies around Libor setting. When lawyers at Citigroup, where he also worked, began to question his methods, he complained to his manager that it was "majorly inconvenient" to get pulled off the desk to answer their questions during the trading day. "To be honest I was confused about the whole thing," he said. "I couldn't work out what it was I had or hadn't done." All of his requests were completely transparent and he thought at the time that people were helping him rig the rate, Mr Hayes, a maths graduate, said.

“I was making a large number of requests. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, for me it was just a numbers exercise.”

The judge advised the jury that Mr Hayes had recently been diagnosed with a mild form of Asperger’s syndrome. He said that because of this condition, Mr Hayes had impairment in social interactions, gave heavily fact-laden descriptions, prioritised tasks over people and did not always get humour or irony.

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015