The five traders — Jonathan Mathew, Philippe Moryoussef, Colin Bermingham, Jay Merchant and Alex Pabon — had already served out the prison sentences handed down between 2016 and 2019. Mathew, Moryoussef and Bermingham were based in London; Merchant and Pabon worked at the bank’s LIBOR operation in New York. Mathew, Merchant, Pabon and Moryoussef were convicted of conspiracy to defraud for their roles in helping to manipulate LIBOR. Bermingham was convicted of a single count of conspiracy to defraud in his role supervising Barclays’ daily submissions for the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, or EURIBOR — a parallel reference rate for banks operating in the euro area.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission, the independent U.K. body that investigates potential miscarriages of justice, referred the cases of the five back to the Court of Appeal in January. The commission said it had found “no distinguishing factor between these cases and the cases of Mr. Hayes and Mr. Palombo.”

The CCRC determined that the same jury misdirection and legal errors that had undermined the Hayes and Palombo convictions had been repeated in the trials of the Barclays traders, rendering their convictions unsafe. The Serious Fraud Office, which prosecuted the interest-rate-rigging cases following a years-long investigation, conceded in January that the convictions of the five bankers “may be” unsafe.

Hayes and Palombo had been convicted in 2015 and 2019, respectively, on charges related to LIBOR and EURIBOR. The Court of Appeal upheld both convictions in 2024, forcing the pair to take their case to the U.K. Supreme Court, which overruled the lower court in July 2025.

The CCRC referred the Barclays cases back to the appellate court roughly six months after the Supreme Court’s July 2025 ruling, in a single determination covering all five traders. The quashing of the Barclays convictions brings the criminal proceedings against five of the individuals prosecuted in the rate-rigging cases to a close.