LIBOR FIXING – LONDON INTERBANK OFFERED RATE – THE GOVERNMENT AND THE BANK OF ENGLAND WERE COMPLICIT

LIBOR FIXING – LONDON INTERBANK OFFERED RATE – THE GOVERNMENT AND THE BANK OF ENGLAND WERE COMPLICIT

Having very successfully sued a series of Banks for mis-selling swops, I have recently read with interest a series of articles concerning appeals by convicted traders, most recently Carl Palombo and Tom Hayes, who suggested in their unsuccessful appeals that the English Court of Appeal had misunderstood Libor when upholding both sentences and convictions – the appeals were dismissed.

Not being involved in those traders’ cases we do not comment on the facts of their cases. However, there are a number of things raised in the media relative to the small number of traders convicted. That small number cynically was about

encouraging the others as it were, a point the convicted traders can legitimately

make about their fate, albeit that it does not really impact to my mind on the liability of the Banks or the traders.

The Bank of England and the Government must have known, as did hundreds fi not thousands of other traders.

What sort of Bank of England and what sort of Government could not have known, that Libor which was supposed to be the rate at which Banks lent to each other, was so routinely and remorselessly manipulated that ti became the rate at which nobody lent anything to anyone.

The only person out of the loop was Joe Public.

The mis-selling of Swops relating to Libor devastated bits of the British economy at

the small and medium enterprise level and led to a great deal of litigation, some successful, some not successful.

The big takeaway to me is that Libor had to be scrapped after the pressure of

litigation and attendant publicity. At the time it was supposed to be the foundation,

the solid foundation, for financial transactions across the Globe. It limped on only to be finally binned in June 2023.

We, through our sister company Sintel, (www.sintelglobal.co.uk) made our own researches which you can read here.

Armed with that intelligence we sued a number of Banks successfully. Swops were a fiddle of unimaginable abortions. What is truly shocking is that the Bank of England and the Government did nothing for years and that people lost their livelihoods as a result.

Libor may be gone but the bankers get rich view of things, the absence of effective regulation, and the impotence and/or disinterest the Government and of the Bank of England appear to as before remain.