The last time Tom Hayes had his picture taken at London’s Southwark Crown Court, he was being snapped through the window of a prison van.
Returning almost exactly a decade later as a free man might have been a triumphant moment for the former UBS and Citigroup trader, who spent five-and-a-half years in jail for supposedly masterminding a scheme to manipulate the benchmark Libor rate.
But after emerging victorious from a 10-year struggle with England’s creaking criminal justice system to overturn one of the longest sentences the country has imposed for white-collar crime, Hayes seems rather underwhelmed.
“Dazed”, is how he sums up feeling after the UK’s highest court, over the river in Westminster, reversed his conviction alongside that of Carlo Palombo, a former Barclays trader jailed for manipulating Euribor, another benchmark rate.
Hayes, 45, found out they had won a day before the unanimous Supreme Court judgment was made public on Wednesday, but the ruling still has “not really” sunk in, he says.
“You think it’s going to be this moment of euphoria,” Hayes reflects after ordering a Coke Zero in a bar nearby. Never a big drinker, his old trader colleagues nicknamed him “Tommy Chocolate” for his preference for hot chocolate over champagne.
“I would describe it more as a moment of disbelief,” he says, likening it to the dissociation he felt when the jury at Southwark returned its guilty verdict in 2015 on eight counts of conspiracy to defraud.
Depicted by the Serious Fraud Office during his trial as a calculating trickster, Hayes was accused of leading other traders and brokers to illicitly influence Libor to boost his trading positions. The now-defunct benchmark underpinned a range of financial products, from mortgages to student loans throughout the global financial system.
The former star yen derivatives trader has long maintained his innocence, saying he and a handful of others — nine individuals were successfully prosecuted by the SFO for rigging benchmark rates — were blamed unfairly for systemic failings.
“All the banks were lying about their borrowing costs,” Hayes says, claiming they were doing so on the instruction of authorities including central banks. “Instead of pursuing that real wrongdoing, it was much easier to look towards us guys.”
Banks and interdealer brokers ended up paying billions of dollars in regulatory fines around the world as a result of the Libor scandal, which exploded in the wake of the financial crisis when public antipathy for bankers was at its height. Politicians called for heads on spikes; the SFO was given special “blockbuster” funding by the Treasury to pursue an investigation.
But the Libor-rigging investigation — and the subsequent forex-rigging probe that dealt with similar allegations — are now coming under renewed scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic. Last week, a US court quashed the conviction of a British former HSBC trader, Mark Johnson, who was jailed as a result of the forex-rigging probe.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Hayes’ conviction, four other traders have said they intend to appeal against theirs.
The Supreme Court judgment this week fell short of exoneration: to Hayes’ chagrin, the panel of five judges said there was “ample evidence” during his trial that might have formed a basis for conviction.
The decision turned on a technical, albeit crucial, legal matter: whether a central question in Hayes’ 2015 trial should have been determined by a jury, or should have been taken as a given as a matter of law.
Jurors at Southwark were told by Mr Justice Cooke, the presiding trial judge, that a Libor rate would inherently not have been “genuine or honest” if it was “influenced by trading advantage”.
Those directions made the verdict a foregone conclusion, says Hayes, who characterises it as the judge saying to the jury: “As a matter of law, he was dishonest. Was he dishonest?”
“With the right directions, I would have” won, he claims.
The Supreme Court reached no such conclusion. It did, however, find that Cooke’s directions “usurped the jury’s function and undermined the fairness of the trial”. Hayes’ conviction at the age of 35 was therefore unsafe.
In response to the judgment this week, the SFO said that having considered the “full circumstances carefully” it had determined it would not “not be in the public interest” to seek a retrial.
Hayes, though, says part of him wants one. “In a perverse way I would have liked a retrial. Because for the rest of my life people will say, ‘well we don’t know’” if he would have been found guilty.
Having converted to Christianity in prison and undergone extensive therapy, Hayes says he is trying his best not to be angry. Yet he is scathing about his treatment, not just by Cooke but by the justice system at all levels.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which considers potential miscarriages of justice, is “just generally useless”, while the SFO is “conflicted” in acting as both prosecutor and investigator.
“Really serious questions” meanwhile need to be asked about the “awful” criminal division of the Court of Appeal, which heard his case on three occasions and upheld his guilty verdict as recently as last year.
The judicial office said the judiciary cannot comment on individual cases. The CCRC said it had needed to review “extensive submissions across a range of complex issues and several thousand pages of information” before referring the case to the Supreme Court.
Hayes’ ordeal is the latest in a series of prominent instances of miscarriages of justice in the UK, including the wrongful prosecutions of hundreds of sub-postmasters by the Post Office. Hayes cites the cases of Peter Sullivan, who spent 38 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, and Andrew Malkinson, who served 17 years before his rape conviction was overturned.
Hayes is also convinced Lucy Letby, the former nurse jailed for murdering babies in her care, is not guilty. “She’s had the prime of her life removed from her,” he adds. “Relative to [that], mine’s nothing.”
The former yen derivatives trader occasionally emails Amanda Knox, the American acquitted of murdering a British student in Italy. “She continually, for the rest of her life, has an element of people thinking she’s guilty,” Hayes says. “I’m going to have that for the rest of my life, too.”
Hayes does not expect to be compensated by the government. Legislation introduced in 2014, means compensation is offered only if a “new or newly discovered fact shows beyond reasonable doubt that the person did not commit the offence”.
“The fact I can’t get any compensation from the government as a matter of course is disgusting,” Hayes says. He should, however, at least be in line for a return of the approximately £870,000 that was confiscated in 2016 as purported proceeds of crime.
The UK Financial Conduct Authority said on Friday that in light of the Supreme Court decision, it would revoke the regulatory ban it had imposed on Hayes and Palombo from working in the finance industry, and it would take no further action against either. Hayes had appealed against the original ban to the Upper Tribunal, which put the case on hold while he attempted to overturn his conviction.
Even so, Hayes is “not massively” keen on working again in the industry, at least for now.
“For the longest time I’ve had no choice” about what to do next, says Hayes, sporting a long-sleeve T-shirt. “Suddenly I’ve got all the choice, and I’m totally overwhelmed by it.”
Nor is he especially hung up on receiving an official apology. Unless it was heartfelt, he says, such a gesture is likely to be “meaningless”.
“Nothing can compensate you for what you’ve lost.”
Hayes has spoken at length about his experience in prison, where some inmates assumed he was a child sex offender given his long sentence: initially 14 years, cut to 11 on appeal.
The time he spent inside was “longer than I was at university, longer than secondary school”. He pauses. “It was very hard.”
During his incarceration, his marriage ended. Hayes and his ex-wife, Sarah, with whom he has a 13-year-old son, are still close and she has been a relentless campaigner for him,
Hayes was released in 2021, but before his conviction was quashed he had a year remaining on his licence, preventing him from leaving the country.
His first holiday since the Supreme Court decision will be not abroad but to St Ives with his son. He leaves on Saturday and is looking forward to the coastal train route, where he hopes to reflect on the momentous week.
Hayes is writing a book and had thought about calling it Guilty Until Proven Innocent, but he thinks the title may be inappropriate “because of that line in the Supreme Court judgment”. “I’m almost tempted to call it Ample Evidence,” he says.
He is considering legal action with “many options” for potential litigation, including against the SFO and UBS, his former employer. “There’s so many torts that I could pursue”, he says. But he is wary of being perceived as “avaricious”.
“I don’t want it to be about the money,” he says. “I’d rather the government actually really reforms the appeal system.”
UBS and the SFO declined to comment on the prospect of litigation.
Hayes, whose new partner recently gave birth to a daughter named Themy — a derivation of Themis, the Greek goddess of justice — is also focused on pursuing the cause of the other seven traders with outstanding convictions.
“We chat all the time,” he says. “To a man, we had all lost faith in the British justice system.”
Back at Southwark, a barrister leaving the court stops to congratulate him. Yet Hayes does not crave attention. “I don’t really want to be famous; don’t want to be infamous. I didn’t want any of this stuff to happen to me.”
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