The Court of Appeal has quashed the conviction of Christian Bittar, a former Deutsche Bank trader who was imprisoned in 2018 for manipulating Euribor, a benchmark interest rate. The decision follows the same court's overturning of five convictions of former Barclays bankers earlier this week. Bittar, who followed proceedings via video link from Switzerland after being denied a visa to attend court, told the BBC he had waited a long time for the ruling.
Bittar is now one of only two traders worldwide with convictions related to interest rate manipulation. The other is former Barclays trader Peter Johnson, who pleaded guilty and has since applied to appeal his conviction. Between 2015 and 2019, around 19 City traders were convicted across nine trials in London and New York. All convictions in the United States were overturned in 2022 after an appeal court found insufficient evidence that traders' requests had broken any rules or laws.
The reversals stem from a 2025 Supreme Court ruling that judges in the original trials had misdirected juries. The court found that whether rate-setting requests were lawful should have been a matter for juries to decide, not judges to determine as a matter of law. Bittar's wife Caroline said the family had lost fifteen valuable years, with their children growing up under the shadow of the conviction.
The overturning of convictions has prompted calls from lawyers and politicians for the Bank of England and Treasury to release records about their own roles in interest rate setting during the financial crisis.