LIBOR rigging

This appeal from Tom Hayes’ conviction for “LIBOR rigging” follows the US acquittals in 2022 of Matt Connolly and Gavin Black of the same crimes, and centres on a two-limbed question:

1. What do the LIBOR and EURIBOR fixing rules mean and, given they were found in a previous trial to mean one thing, while the appellants believed them to mean another,
2. Whose job was it to decide what they meant? Was it, in other words, a matter of fact or law?

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“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble,… “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”

— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

US courts, in acquitting Connolly and Black, had considered them to be matters of fact. The English court considers contractual interpretation of contracts to be a matter of law. This seems right, though it leaves something out, which is what did the parties believe the rules to mean? Under the intellectual theory of the law that goes only to mitigation and not liability, though — as we will see — in a market where plainly everyone shared an opinion, different from the legal one, about what the contract meant, this risks rendering the law a ass.

See also

• LIBOR