Rigged: The Incredible True Story of the Whistleblowers Jailed after Exposing the Rotten Heart of the Financial System

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Every morning for four decades, someone working at the “cash desk” of each of the biggest investment banks in London would send a message to a central authority – the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), at the time of the 2008 crisis – detailing how much they expected it would cost them to borrow money that day. For many years, it was common for traders to ask if the rate could be nudged in one direction or another. Tom Hayes told POLITICO he was pleased that thanks to the investigative journalism of Andrew Verity the real story about false Libor submissions was coming to light. It’s that fact which meant I struggled a bit with what to think of the book - the entire scandal always seemed a bit overblown relative to the scale of the financial crisis (wasn’t it pretty obviously the thing that got prosecuted because it felt comprehensible, rather than because it merited it? M. to a previous statement, where it said: “All either pleaded guilty or were found guilty by a jury.

French bank Credit Agricole dropped its Euribor estimates of the cost of borrowing euros over three months by 0. The rate depended on daily submissions from low-ranking bankers to form a consensus on the cost of funding on any given day. In 1991 the former Morgan Stanley trader Douglas Keenan reported that banks were increasing their profits by misreporting the amount it would cost them to borrow. The manner in which old work colleagues are pitted against each other (with prosecutors effectively knowing that those intending to stick to the truth will not fare as well as those who lie to please the prosecutors) is deeply unsettling. Speaking in Parliament, senior Conservative MP David Davis said: "I'm greatly concerned the Treasury Select Committee may have been misled by state agencies about the knowledge and involvement of the state in setting false rates.The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) convicted a total of nine traders for their role in rigging London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, including former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes. Before 2017, the legal test for dishonesty under Ghosh required juries to consider whether the defendant was acting dishonestly according to the standards of ordinary reasonable people and whether the defendant realised that what they were doing was dishonest by those standards. Corruption, collusion and a miscarriage of justice on both sides of the Atlantic, where whistleblowers were wrongly jailed for crimes they didn't commit: this is the shocking true story of the Libor scandal, just not as you knew it.

Andy Verity is the award-winning economics correspondent for BBC News, covering finance and business on the BBC radio and TV bulletins as well as reporting for Panorama , BBC Newsnight and BBC Radio 4’s investigative strand, File on Four . Before the credit crunch struck in 2007 he proposed a TV series warning of the risks of an imminent crash in the housing market which became BBC2’s The Truth About Property, attracting an unusually large audience; it was repeat-commissioned both before and after the crisis of 2008. Joining the BBC from The Independent, he worked first as personal finance correspondent then as a presenter on BBC Radio Five Live, where for 8 years he hosted the BBC’s daily financial radio programme and popular podcast Wake up to Money. To save themselves from collapse, nationalisation and loss of bonuses, banks instruct traders to manipulate Libor down – a criminal practice known as lowballing. In the UK, 39 people were prosecuted for fraud relating to the manipulation of Libor and Euribor, 19 were convicted, and nine jailed.

A widespread attempt at state level to manipulate Libor might also be relevant to a jury’s assessment of whether the accused was acting dishonestly – a key ingredient of fraud offences. He can currently be heard on the UK's Today program, Radio Four’s six o’clock news and the BBC News TV channel.

In a similar fashion to the juries mentioned in the book, I can't speak to the completeness of the evidence presented to me. The regulators, the US Department of Justice and the Serious Fraud Office rushed to assuage that anger and deliver convictions but failed to do the work necessary to properly fulfil their task. They show that following a co-ordinated cut in official rates by six central banks on 8 October 2008, there were also record falls in banks' estimates of the cost of borrowing euros by French banks - moves only explicable as having been co-ordinated at a national level. Interviewing him in November 2010, the US regulator confirmed it had seen data that Chase New York had offered to lend at 4. Above all, it's the story of how a rigorous investigative journalist, some brave whistle-blowers and the US courts, cracked open a closed and corrupt circuit of London bankers.

At the same time, a non-expert's testimony is accepted even though that person has openly admitted to being out of his depth. Following rulings by the Supreme Court In Ivey v Genting Casinos and the Court of Appeal in Barton in 2020, the test for dishonesty now requires a jury to consider what facts the accused actually knew or believed at the time, and whether their conduct was dishonest when viewed by the standards of ordinary people. LOWBALLING was the real crime, and something that should be investigated/punished, but the big boys always have too much power and control over the government. It's a shocking extravagance, but I'm likely to find any excuse under the sun not to do my workouts unless I have someone telling me what to do and shouting at me if I don't do it. Even people like myself (who got not guilty verdicts) subsequently found all professional doors firmly shut.

When it proves impossible for the investigators to pin the crime on the banks themselves, they turn on the traders. This book matters, because the integrity of our Parliamentary democracy is something that’s worth fighting for. This case illustrates why Parliament should bolster its information-gathering powers with more effective sanctions against those who provide less than the full picture.Libor and Euribor rates were estimates that banks provided of the cost of borrowing money from each other, and that influenced interest rates for mortgages and loans. Andy is the award-winning economics correspondent for BBC News, covering finance and business on the BBC radio and TV bulletins as well as reporting for Panorama, BBC Newsnight and BBC Radio 4’s investigative strand, File on Four.