Christian Bittar, formerly of Deutsche Bank, became the eighth person to have a conviction for interest-rate rigging overturned on Friday. Unlike the five Barclays traders cleared earlier in the week — whose appeals the Serious Fraud Office chose not to contest — Bittar's acquittal came over the SFO's active objection. The court ruled against the prosecution anyway. The dominoes began falling in earnest just over a year ago, when the UK Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes (UBS/Citigroup) and Carlo Palombo (Barclays). The court found that trial judges had given "inaccurate and unfair" instructions to juries, effectively depriving the defendants of fair trials. That ruling opened the floodgates. Every subsequent appeal has succeeded on the same foundational defect. The rates at the center of these cases — Euribor and the now-defunct Libor — were not obscure technical benchmarks. They underpinned the pricing of hundreds of trillions of pounds and euros in financial products, directly affecting ordinary people's mortgages, pensions, and savings. The manipulation was real. The question the courts have now answered is whether the prosecutions were conducted fairly, and the answer is no. Of the nine traders originally convicted, eight have now been cleared. The ninth, Peter Johnson, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to conspiring to manipulate Libor, has filed provisional grounds for appeal. His legal team at Vardags confirmed the process is underway. If Johnson succeeds, the entire prosecution programme will have produced zero lasting convictions. The SFO's position is now untenable as a matter of institutional credibility. Jason Williams, head of division, offered a carefully worded statement respecting the court's decision. But Ben Rose of Hickman and Rose, representing Bittar, was blunter: it is a "scandal that the SFO has consistently failed to uphold its duty to ensure that these trials are fair." The structural problem is not that financial misconduct went unpunished — it's that the state apparatus built to punish it was so procedurally deficient that a decade of work, millions in public funds, and the incarceration of multiple individuals all rested on jury instructions that the Supreme Court later found inaccurate. The misconduct itself — the coordinated manipulation of benchmark rates affecting global finance — remains uncontested in the factual record. What remains is a vacuum. The behaviour that triggered the prosecutions has not been relitigated or reframed as lawful; the convictions simply cannot stand because of how the trials were conducted. The public bears the cost twice: once from the original rate manipulation, and again from a failed enforcement apparatus that consumed resources without delivering durable accountability.
