British traders face US prison over Libor

Two former British traders face prison after being convicted in a US court of conspiring to rig the Libor benchmark interest rate.

Anthony Allen and Anthony Conti, who worked for Dutch lender Rabobank, were found guilty of a number of fraud charges.

Prosecutors said Allen, 44, and Conti, 46, conspired between 2005 and 2011 to manipulate U.S. dollar and yen Libor rates to gain an unfair advantage for the bank in trading Libor-linked derivatives.

Allen, former head of Rabobank’s global liquidity and finance department, slumped down on a table in court as the foreman of the Manhattan jury (Hamburg: 32U.HM – news) read the verdict.

Lawyers for both men said they plan to appeal. They were released on bail and were scheduled for sentencing in March. It was the first U.S. trial following a global investigation into bank rigging of Libor.

Libor, the rate offered on the London interbank market, is the rate that financial institutions charge each other for loans, calculated on the basis of data provided by a panel of banks. It is used as the basis for financial products worth hundreds of trillions of dollars.

International regulatory authorities have already imposed multi-billion dollar fines on banks for rigging Libor rates. The case against Allen and Conti was brought by the US Department of Justice after Rabobank reached a $1 billion (£660 million) deal in October 2013, resolving related investigations in the US and Europe.

Prosecutors relied on the testimony of three former Rabobank salespeople who pleaded guilty under cooperation agreements, as well as e-mails and instant messages sent at the time.

One of them, Paul Robson, told the court that Libor was intended to be an “impartial market tool” but “we distorted or obfuscated the conclusions to help investors.”

Leslie Caldwell, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said: “Today’s sentences illustrate the Department’s successful efforts to hold bank executives accountable for this global fraud scheme.”

The sentences come after former UBS (NYSEArca: FBGX – news) and Citigroup (NYSE: C – news) trader Tom Hayes was sentenced to 14 years in prison following a trial in the United Kingdom earlier this year.