Background: the LIBOR prosecution and conviction
Tom Hayes was a derivatives trader who worked at UBS and later Citigroup, specialising in yen interest-rate products. In 2015 he was convicted at Southwark Crown Court of eight counts of conspiracy to defraud in connection with alleged manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and was sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment, later reduced to 11 years on appeal. The prosecution relied heavily on Hayes’s own statements — given during extended interviews conducted after his arrest — as well as on expert characterisation of LIBOR-setting conduct that was subsequently challenged by academic economists and legal scholars as conflating industry-standard practice with criminal behaviour.
The Supreme Court quashing and its significance
Following a decade-long campaign — during which Hayes spent approximately five and a half years in custody — the United Kingdom Supreme Court quashed his conviction in 2025. The Supreme Court’s reasoning addressed the legal definition of the offence and the directions given to the jury, but the case also exposed the broader vulnerabilities that Hayes had consistently argued: expert witnesses who characterised contested financial conduct as unambiguously criminal; interview admissions given without full legal protection that formed a disproportionate share of the prosecution’s case; and an institutional environment in which the political and regulatory pressure to secure convictions influenced the quality of scrutiny applied to the prosecution case.
Confessions obtained under duress
Hayes has spoken extensively about the circumstances in which his interview statements were obtained and the way in which those statements were later used at trial. His experience bears directly on one of the contested questions in the Letby case: the weight that should be attached to post-arrest interview statements and prison-diary entries characterised by the prosecution as admissions. Hayes’s argument — drawn from direct personal experience rather than academic analysis — is that the conditions under which such statements are made, and the interpretive framework imposed on them by prosecution advocates, can produce a profoundly misleading picture of what was said and why.
The cultural-moment problem
One of the structural observations Hayes makes about his own case is what might be called the cultural-moment problem: at the height of post-2008 financial-crisis anger, the social and media environment created conditions in which senior commentators were reluctant to examine LIBOR case evidence critically for fear of being seen as defending banker behaviour. He identifies an analogous dynamic in the Letby case, where the gravity of the alleged conduct — the murder of infants — and the emotional weight of the bereaved-family narrative created a public environment in which journalists and commentators who might otherwise have scrutinised prosecution evidence forensically declined to do so. The parallel is structural, not substantive: Hayes does not comment on the clinical or scientific merits of the Letby case, but on the sociological conditions that shape how controversial criminal cases are publicly processed.
Read alongside
- Alan Bates — Post Office Horizon miscarriage of justice
- Nick Wallis — investigative journalist
- Sally Clark
- Analysis: Sally Clark parallel
- Lucia de Berk
- Analysis: Lucia de Berk parallel
- Commentary library
Source
UK Supreme Court judgment (2025) quashing the Hayes LIBOR conviction; Southwark Crown Court trial records 2015; public statements and interviews by Tom Hayes; published journalism on the LIBOR proceedings; Hayes’s public commentary on the Letby case.