Five traders jailed for rigging interest rates were cleared after evidence pointed to central banks

Outside London's Court of Appeal on Wednesday, the cheering started almost before the lawyers had finished speaking.

"Hip hip, hooray," shouted the families and friends of five former traders. After years in prison and a decade fighting to clear their names, the men had just heard that their convictions were quashed.

The five men had all worked for Barclays, the British bank. They had been sentenced to up to eight years in prison for manipulating LIBOR and EURIBOR, benchmark interest rates that help set the cost of millions of mortgages and business loans around the world. The court ruled that their trials had been unfair.

The decision was the latest turn in a scandal that dates back to the 2008 financial crisis. No top executive faced charges over the meltdown and the downturn that came afterward. When Barclays was fined for rate rigging in July 2012, lawmakers demanded arrests, and Bob Diamond, the bank's chief executive, resigned. The cases that followed focused on lower ranking staff. From 2015 to 2019, 19 traders in Britain and the United States were convicted, and nine served time behind bars.

For the men involved, the cost was personal and lasting. Colin Birmingham, a former Barclays cash trader sentenced to four years in 2019, lost his mother while he was inside. Asked if she had lived to see him cleared, he answered simply, "No."

Jonathan Matthew, a former Barclays colleague accused of conspiracy to commit fraud when he was 23, was jailed in 2016 and exonerated 10 years later at age 45. "At the time, my first child had just been born, so I missed her first birthday because I was locked in a prison cell," said Jonathan Matthew. He described prison as a place where "someone's just taking a grenade and throwing it into your life."

Last year, Britain's Supreme Court quashed two other trader convictions. With Wednesday's ruling, 17 of the 19 convictions have now been overturned. Britain's Serious Fraud Office insists the final two verdicts should stand.

What changed the cases was evidence uncovered by the BBC since the trials that pointed far higher up the financial system. It indicated that central banks in several countries, among them Britain's central bank, had been involved during the crisis in rigging the same benchmark rates, on a far larger scale than the actions attributed to the traders. According to the Bank, LIBOR was not regulated at the time, and in 2017 it promised to release its records on the affair. Nine years later, those records have still not been released.