Ex-Barclays Traders Lose Appeal Pinned on UBS Intern on Jury
Ex-Barclays Traders Lose Appeal Pinned on UBS Intern on Jury
(Bloomberg) -- Two former Barclays Plc traders convicted of helping rig a key benchmark rate lost their appeal after a London court dismissed their argument that an ex-UBS Group AG intern on the jury “inevitably” influenced the verdict.
Lawyers for Carlo Palombo, 42, and Colin Bermingham, 64, said at an appeal hearing in October that the juror would have had some knowledge about the industry that would have prevented him from being impartial.
Palombo, who was sentenced to four years in prison, and Bermingham, who was sentenced to five, were found guilty by a London jury last year. The convictions were part of the U.K. Serious Fraud Office’s probe into efforts to manipulate the Euro interbank offered rate, which is related to trillions of dollars worth of loans and derivatives.
“Nothing revealed” that the juror in question “had special knowledge either of the individuals involved or the facts of the case,” Judge Adrian Fulford said Wednesday in his ruling. “We are unpersuaded that a fair-minded and informed observer would have concluded that there was a real possibility of jury bias.”
‘Two-Month Intern’
The juror was an intern at UBS four years after the end of the indictment period and nearly six years before serving on the jury, Fulford said. He only worked at the bank for two months and wasn’t engaged in Euribor or Libor-related work and hadn’t taken an active interest in either.
“We are very disappointed at the ruling,” Raj Chada, Palombo’s lawyer, said by email. “It remains clear to us that Mr. Palombo’s conviction is unsafe and we are considering our options for a further appeal.”
A lawyer for Bermingham declined to comment.
The SFO said the ruling reaffirmed the verdict, which came after a previous mistrial.
“Their actions undermined a system critical to the functioning of the global economy and risked the investments, savings and pensions of millions of hard-working people,” the agency said in a statement.
During the October hearing, lawyers for Palombo and Bermingham had described the juror as former employee of UBS. The extent of his role as a summer intern, only came out in Wednesday’s ruling.
But the lawyers for the men had said his fleeting background in finance still would have made him an “authority on financial issues.”
“There is reliable evidence that he communicated his private knowledge to other jurors which would, inevitably, have influenced their verdicts,” the lawyers had said in documents released Wednesday but submitted before the ruling.
David Corker, criminal lawyer at Corker Binning who wasn’t involved in the appeal, said “having established that this juror had no expert or special knowledge of how Libor or Euribor worked and that UBS was not implicated by the prosecution as part of its case the court held that it is not only permissible but beneficial that jurors apply their experience of life to their task of deliberating on an accused’s guilt.”
“It held that were this allegation of bias to be upheld, it would entail that no one who had worked for a bank or who had followed business media reports about the Libor scandal would be eligible,” he said.
Coffee Boy
UBS was fined 160 million pounds ($207 million) by U.K. financial regulators in 2012 related to Euribor and its better known sister rate, Libor. In addition, Tom Hayes, who was convicted for rigging Libor, had worked at UBS.
The juror’s summer internship came to light after the police investigated a complaint that the juror had discussed the sentences handed out at the first trial to ex-Deutsche Bank AG trader Christian Bittar and ex-Barclays trader Philippe Moryoussef.
In addition, the juror who complained said that the ex-UBS intern had talked about the fact that Barclays was given a considerable fine for “rate rigging.” The police concluded that there was no evidence of any offense.
While his lawyers had focused on the influence of an intern during the appeal, Palombo attracted international headlines during the trial when he compared a junior trader to someone working at McDonald’s.
“As ridiculous as it sounds, a coffee boy at Barclays gets paid 400,000 pounds a year,” Palombo said during his first trial in 2018.
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