Former Deutsche Bank star trader Christian Bittar’s conviction for interest-rate rigging has been overturned despite his earlier guilty plea, marking the near-total collapse of the UK’s prosecutions for benchmark manipulation.
The rare reversal of a criminal confession by the Court of Appeal is the latest setback for the Serious Fraud Office, which had insisted Bittar’s conviction should have stood.
Five former Barclays traders also had their rate-rigging convictions quashed this week, though while prosecutors had conceded the Barclays cases without a fight, the SFO drew a line at Bittar due to his guilty plea.
The decisions represent a serious unravelling of the UK’s prosecutions of traders who were blamed for manipulating interest rate benchmarks, which became a lightning rod for public anger about banks in the wake of the financial crisis.
Bittar, once described by a judge as “perhaps the best in the world” in his field, netted tens of millions of pounds working for Deutsche in the mid-2000s in London.
The derivatives specialist spent almost two years in prison after pleading guilty at Southwark Crown Court in 2018 to conspiring to manipulate the Euribor rate.
At a hearing on Friday, Adrian Darbishire KC, for Bittar, said it would be “grotesquely unfair” for his conviction to stand. Darbishire said Bittar only pleaded guilty because court rulings at the time left him with no viable defence.
Benchmarks such as Euribor underpinned trillions of dollars in financial contracts and were determined each day by submissions from large banks.
Judges had told juries in the rate-rigging cases that any submission that had been influenced by commercial self-interest was automatically false, as a matter of law.
The Supreme Court last year found those directions had been erroneous when it overturned the convictions of two other traders, Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo.
Darbishire highlighted that while Bittar had pleaded guilty, the trader had not admitted that he had submitted rates that were, in fact, false or dishonest.
James Waddington KC, for the SFO, urged a panel of three senior judges not to overturn Bittar’s conviction. His plea was “proof of guilt, it being immaterial that Mr Bittar protested his innocence to his lawyers”.
“The evidence against Mr Bittar was overwhelming,” Waddington told the court.
Lord Justice Edis, Mr Justice Goose and Mr Justice Moody said Bittar’s conviction should be quashed and that their reasons would be provided at a later date.
“I have waited a very, very long time for this day,” Bittar said in a statement on Friday. “Finally, the injustice of what I and others suffered has been recognised. I am so grateful for those who stood by me through this ordeal and those who worked so tirelessly to correct it.”
His solicitor Ben Rose, of Hickman & Rose, added: “It is a scandal that the SFO has consistently failed to uphold its duty to seek to ensure that these trials are fair. It is hard to see how it will learn the lessons it needs to of this saga until it accepts it was wrong.”
Jason Williams, head of the fraud and corruption division at the SFO, said: “We argued for a different outcome but respect the court’s decision in relation to Christian Bittar. The SFO remains committed to tackling the most complex fraud, bribery and corruption.”
Friday’s decision means the only trader with an outstanding conviction is Peter Johnson, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to manipulate Libor in 2014.
The former Barclays trader has also filed provisional grounds of appeal. “Peter’s fight to clear his name continues,” his lawyer Ellen Gallagher, partner at law firm Vardags, said on Friday.