UK Court Overturns Ex-Deutsche Bank Trader's Rate-Rigging Conviction
Christian Bittar, jailed in 2018 for rigging interest rates, has had his conviction quashed by the UK Court of Appeal.
A former Deutsche Bank derivatives trader who was sentenced to prison in 2018 for manipulating benchmark interest rates has had his conviction overturned by the UK Court of Appeal, according to a report by BBC News.
Christian Bittar was among a wave of financial professionals prosecuted in the years following the Libor scandal, a widespread scheme in which traders at major banks were accused of colluding to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate — a benchmark that underpinned trillions of dollars in global financial contracts. His jailing had been seen as a significant enforcement milestone in the post-financial-crisis crackdown on market misconduct.
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The Court of Appeal's decision to quash Bittar's conviction marks a notable reversal in one of the high-profile cases to emerge from that era of regulatory scrutiny. Appeals courts in the UK have in recent years revisited several rate-rigging convictions, with some judges finding fault in how juries were directed or how the law was applied to trading behavior that occurred before regulatory definitions were clearly established.
The outcome raises fresh questions about the legal boundaries prosecutors drew when pursuing rate-rigging cases, and whether the evidence and jury instructions in those trials met the standards required for a sound conviction. Defense arguments in related cases have centered on whether traders genuinely understood their conduct to be unlawful at the time.
Continue reading at BBC News.
