Tom Hayes claims he was ‘hand-picked scapegoat’ for the Swiss bank as it tried to avoid regulatory scrutiny
Tom Hayes, the first banker jailed over the Libor interest rate-rigging scandal, is suing his former employer UBS for $400m, claiming he was “hand-picked scapegoat” for the Swiss bank as it tried to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
The claim, which was publicly filed in a US court in Connecticut on Monday, alleges that UBS misled US authorities and called him an “evil mastermind” behind the alleged Libor scandal, in order to protect senior executives and minimise fines.
Hayes spent five and a half years of an 11-year term in prison after he was accused of being a ringleader in a vast conspiracy to fix the now defunct London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) – which was used to price trillions of pounds worth of financial products – between 2006 and 2010.
The wider scandal, which erupted in 2012, led to fines of almost $10bn (£7.4bn) for a dozen banks and brokerages. Hayes maintained his innocence and claimed during his original trial that he was taking part in an “industry-wide” practice, accusing regulators of making him a scapegoat.
