Mike Curtler, a former trader and broker at Deutsche Bank, was one of the 38 individuals who faced criminal charges when the Department of Justice in the United States proclaimed their behaviour to be unlawful ten years ago.
On the other hand, an appeals court in the United States concluded earlier this year that no regulations had been infringed.
The attorney for Mr. Curtler said that he and his client were “very happy” with the verdict.
In the past eight years, 38 former brokers and traders have been prosecuted for sending emails and messages asking coworkers to adjust their estimates of the cost of borrowing cash to suit their bank’s commercial interests. This practise was recognised as illegal interest rate “rigging” by the United States Department of Justice in 2012, when it fined Barclays Bank for it.
As part of the procedure to determine the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), the index that monitors the cost of borrowing funds, estimates of the interest rates that banks were paying were turned in each morning. This was done as part of the process that led to the creation of Libor.
The London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) monitors the interest rates at which financial institutions are willing to borrow cash from other financial institutions on the wholesale money markets.
It has been used over the last three decades and a half to determine the interest rates that are applied to millions of residential and commercial loans all around the globe.
In order to calculate the daily value of the Libor, sixteen different banks are asked the same question: at what interest rate are they able to borrow money? They send in their replies, and then a mean is calculated from them.
Messages and emails requesting for certain interest rates to be presented as “high” or “low” were the pieces of evidence that were used as evidence against Mike Curtler and other dealers.
Mike Curtler stated that he had acted on the emailed demands, and he pled guilty in order to avoid the possibility of spending up to 15 years in a US prison if the case went to trial.
Former Deutsche Bank traders Gavin Black from Middlesex and Matt Connolly from New Jersey were acquitted in January of this year in the United States after an appeals court concluded that the demands were not unlawful after all and reached that conclusion.
The courts in the United States are now acquitting even those who have pled guilty, such as Mike Curtler, on the grounds that they must be considered innocent.
“I cannot express how relieved I am that the courts in the United States have concluded that what we did does not constitute a crime. The last ten years have been a nightmare, but it is my sincere hope that we may finally begin to recover “It was Mr. Curtler who said.
David Krakoff, who represents Mr. Curtler, said that “We are quite glad that Mike Curtler has been exonerated and that the courts have ruled that there was no misconduct at all.”
The conviction of former trader Tim Parietti, 56, who had also pled guilty was overturned by a New York court a month ago, and the court ordered the government to return a punishment of one million pounds.
As a result, the United Kingdom is the only nation in the world where, at this point, convictions for “rigging” interest rates have been upheld in a court of law.
Tom Hayes, Peter Johnson, Jonathan Mathew, Alex Pabon, Jay Merchant, Christian Bittar, Philippe Moryoussef, Carlo Palombo, and Colin Bermingham are among the nine individuals who have been found guilty and sentenced in the United Kingdom.
