The extraordinary downfall of the superstar trader

Tom Hayes shared cells with killers. Now he’s fighting to clear his name

- TRISTAN KIRK

Convicted white-collar criminals can normally hope to spend their time inside in low-security prisons reserved for non-violent offenders. But the reality was starkly different for former City trader Tom Hayes, who received a 14-year prison sentence at Southwark Crown Court in August 2015 for his role in the Libor interest rate rigging scandal.

‘At one stage he found himself sharing a cell at maximum security HMP Belmarsh, not with fellow middle-class fraudsters, but with “two guys who had assassinated someone with a Mac-10 machine gun’.

The unlikely trio were locked up together for 23 hours a day, his cellmates watching “terrible television” round the clock. Eventually Hayes plucked up the courage to ask for a turn on the remote. “They came back and said I could watch half an hour a night. For my first half hour I chose Have I Got News For You.” It is safe to say his cellmates were “unimpressed by Paul Merton and Ian Hislop’.

It is just one of the extraordinary recollections of the 45-year-old former UBS and Citibank trader who was handed one of the toughest penalties for white-collar crime in British criminal justice history. After losing at the Court of Appeal last year he is now turning to the Supreme Court for a final shot at redemption.

Hayes admits he spent much of his time behind bars — five and a half years in total — burning with rage at his downfall.

The charges against him stemmed from his work in Tokyo as an interest rate derivatives trader for Swiss bank UBS, between August 2006 and September 2009, and then at Citibank until September 2010.

Hayes was charged with, and then convicted of, eight counts of conspiracy to defraud by unlawfully manipulating the yen Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate), an interest rate set daily after submissions by big banks on their expected borrowing charges.