Just days after Hillary Clinton is found to have negligently broken laws but faced no charges, four former Barclays bankers appear to have been scapegoated over their libor-rigging. 45-year-old Jay Merchant was the hardest hit – sentenced to 6 1/2 Years in prison.
As Bloomberg reports,
Four former Barclays Plc traders were sentenced to as many as 6 1/2 years in prison for manipulating the Libor interest-rate benchmark as U.K. judges continued meting out tough punishments for white-collar crime.
Jay Merchant, 45, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison.
Peter Johnson, 61, and Jonathan Mathew, 35, received four years in prison.
Alex Pabon, 38, will serve two years and nine months in jail.
The convictions are a “major victory” for the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, which conducted the investigation.
They also come four years after 11 major banks and brokerages, including Barclays, received hefty fines over rate-fixing, prompting “a political and public backlash that forced out former CEO Bob Diamond, an overhaul of Libor rules and the criminal inquiry”, says The Guardian.
Ironically, given the Hillary debacle, the defendants argued they should not be found guilty “because they did not know they were behaving dishonestly and so did not meet the legal definition of fraud”, reports the Daily Telegraph.
Justice for some? Ignorance, it seems, is not innocent bliss for everyone.
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