Former City trader’s rate rigging conviction overturned

A former City trader previously convicted of rigging the Euribor interest rates has had his fraud conviction overturned. Christian Bittar, formerly a trader at Deutsche Bank, had his conviction overturned by the Court of Appeal on Friday after serving five years in prison for rigging the primary European interest rate, the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (Euribor), in the run-up to the financial crisis. He previously pleaded guilty to the charge. For reasons we will set out at a later date, this conviction has been quashed, Lord Justice Edis told the court. The decision comes just over a year after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision to overturn a similar ruling on former UBS trader Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, formerly of Barclays, last year, after finding they had been deprived of a fair trial as the judges had given inaccurate and unfair directions to the juries which found the traders guilty. The two former City traders became the faces of the so-called ‘Libor sca