Tom Hayes, a former financial trader serving an 11-year jail sentence for conspiracy to rig Libor interest rates, will this week return to a London court in a multimillion-pound battle against prosecutors over assets that include a seven-bedroom country house.
Hayes and his corporate lawyer wife, Sarah, are both expected to give evidence to try to prevent the seizure of their entire estate, which prosecutors value at £3.8m, including Sarah’s jewellery, and which they allege has been paid for with the proceeds of crime.
Five days of hearings begin on Monday and are expected to focus on the couple’s former home in Surrey, which they bought in 2011 and began to renovate before the Serious Fraud Office launched criminal proceedings.
The house, which is now in Sarah’s name, has been rented out since the couple moved to a more modest property in Hampshire to be nearer their family.
Hayes’s lawyer declined to comment ahead of the proceedings at the Old Bailey.
Cast as the ringleader in a rate-rigging scam that has cost banks billions in regulatory fines, Hayes was found guilty in August of conspiring to rig Libor – an interest-rate benchmark used to set rates on hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of financial contracts and household loans worldwide.
The former Tokyo-based UBS and Citigroup trader denied dishonesty during his trial and argued in court he had always been open about trading methods that he said had been condoned by senior managers and was common industry practice at the time. He was handed a 14-year sentence, which was reduced to 11 years on appeal.
Hayes, who was diagnosed with mild Asperger’s syndrome shortly before his London trial last year, is a gifted mathematician who traded yen-denominated interest rate derivatives tied to Libor – essentially betting against others on the direction of rates.
During the three years he worked for UBS, he made around £200m for the bank before he was lured away to Citigroup in 2009 with a £2.2m bonus, the court heard during his trial. Citigroup sacked him in 2010 for attempted rate-rigging as a global investigation started to focus on how yen Libor rates were set.
Hayes returned to England, married Sarah and the couple settled briefly in Surrey.
