The whistleblowing bankers who were sent to jail
Two traders jailed for rigging interest rates were the original whistleblowers of the scandal, and not the bosses that directed them to carry out the illegal actions.
Leaked audio recordings reveal Peter Johnson and Colin Bermingham alerted the US central bank to a fraud that the tapes suggest was directed from the top of the financial system.
But no senior figure was prosecuted. The Serious Fraud Office concluded the test for prosecution was not met.
Instead the whistleblowers were themselves sent to jail.
Peter Johnson, was repeatedly instructed by senior managers at Barclays to engage in the fraud, known as “lowballing”.
It involved lying about the interest rates banks were paying during the financial crisis, pretending they could borrow cash much more cheaply than they really could.
The conversations, evidence of a criminal fraud in the midst of the worst financial crisis in eighty years, are part of a cache of secret audio recordings revealed in The Lowball Tapes, a pioneering series investigating the secret history of interest rate “rigging”.
They reveal that Johnson, convicted separately for manipulating rates on a much smaller scale, in fact tried to bring lowballing to the authoritiesâ attention, starting in 2007.
He repeatedly alerted the US central bank, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) to the fact that banks were lying about the interest rates they were paying to borrow dollars.
The stakes were high. This was at the beginning of the “credit crunch” â the early days of the financial crisis when banks were becoming afraid to lend to each other, and charging higher rates to reflect their fears.
In a few weeks, this would lead to the Northern Rock bank collapse, and develop into a financial crisis the following year.
For months, his campaign fell on deaf ears. While his immediate bosses were sympathetic, they said they were passing on instructions from above.
Against his vehement protests, Johnson joined in the same fraud he was seeking to expose, making dishonest statements about the cost of borrowing cash which did not reflect the real cost his bank was paying on the markets.
The recordings suggest board directors were concerned that if Johnson told the truth, it might look to journalists like Barclays was paying higher interest rates because it was desperate for money.
To avoid giving that impression, Barclays and other banks engaged in lowballing, a serious form of misconduct for which banks have since paid hundreds of millions in fines.
In November 2007, after months of pressure from his bosses to lie, Johnson vented his frustration on the phone to a 25-year-old colleague at Barclaysâ Wall Street office called Ryan.
In an expletive-laden call, an extract of which is below, Johnson calls it âsickâ and âwrong.â
Ryan: “Should be higher?”
Johnson: “Much, much higher… believe me, youâve got no idea how much higher.”
He tells Ryan: “I think itâs becoming a sort of ethical and legal thing now. Iâm patently giving a false rate!”
Johnson also protested to his boss, Mark Dearlove, saying: “I think we should take a stand. Iâm going to write you an email and you can do with it what you want.”
Dearlove: “Ok, fair enough. Youâre right ‘cos I want to get something written down for the guys upstairs…”
Johnson: “So Iâll just write a thing. Iâll just say I think its bringing the Libor market into disrepute, Barclays into disrepute, me into disrepute…”
Johnson wrote an email for Dearlove to circulate to senior management saying the bank was being “dishonest by definition”. But that didnât stop him being ordered to lowball.
In the confidential tapes, we hear Johnson being told by his bosses that the need to fix interest rates came from above: first from senior managers at Barclays Bank, then from instructions from the Bank of England, then from the UK government, including Downing Street.
The tapes reveal that Johnson and Bermingham repeatedly blew the whistle to the US central bank about his and other banks publishing false estimates of the cost of borrowing cash, known as “Libor submissions”.
On 11 April 2008, Bermingham alerted the Fed to what he regarded as a broken market, frankly telling them that Barclays, like other banks, is not posting “honest” estimates of the cost of borrowing cash. The Fed official says she understands fully and does not report a crime.
At the peak of the financial crisis, a few weeks after the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers sent stock markets plunging, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced unprecedented emergency measures on 8 October 2008, including ÂŁ50bn to recapitalise the banks.
On the same day, seven central banks from the US to Japan to Europe announced a co-ordinated cut in their official interest rates. Then RBS and Lloyds had to be rescued and nationalised.
But the real cost of borrowing cash, as measured by Libor, wasnât dropping fast enough to show the emergency measures were working.
On 24 October 2008, Johnson told an official at the Fed about false rates being posted, saying “Please donât believe it, itâs absolute rubbish.”
On 29 October 2008, the then executive director of the Bank of England (BoE) Paul Tucker called Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond and told him that “senior figures” in Whitehall were asking why Barclaysâ Libor rates were always too high.
Mr Diamond was concerned the government would think it meant that Barclays was struggling to get the funds it needed and had to be nationalised.
The same day, Johnson received a call from his boss Mr Dearlove, who told him: “PJ, youâre going to absolutely hate this… but we’ve had some very serious pressure from the UK Government and the Bank of England about pushing our Libors lower.”
Agreeing itâs “the wrong thing to do,” Mr Dearlove says, âI am as reluctant as you are… These guys donât see it, theyâre bent out of shape. Theyâre calling everyoneâŠâ
Both the US Department of Justice and the Serious Fraud Office had access to all the recordings handed to them by Barclaysâ legal department.
But they didnât rush to find out more about all the evidence pointing to the top. Much of the evidence revealed in the tapes has never been published
Far from being thanked for their whistleblowing, Johnson and Bermingham were separately prosecuted by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) for taking part in a much smaller kind of interest rate “rigging” which in most countries of the world is not seen as criminal.
Both Johnson and Bermingham were convicted and jailed as part of what traders allege is a whole series of miscarriages of justice involving nine criminal trials on both sides of the Atlantic.
After initially defending himself, Johnson chose not to fight the charges and pleaded guilty in 2014 to conspiring to manipulate Libor.
Bermingham was found guilty in 2019Â of conspiring to manipulate the sister rate of Libor, Euribor, and jailed for five years.
In all, 38 traders and brokers have been prosecuted, 24 of them in the UK and 14 in the United States, for âriggingâ two benchmark interest rates, Libor and Euribor. In nine trials, seven of them in the UK, more have been acquitted than convicted as juries doubted the case against them.
Former Barclays boss Diamond has maintained there was no government or Bank of England pressure to lowball and has denied knowledge of it at the time.
The Bank of England has also denied that it put pressure on banks to lowball and stated that Libor was not regulated at the time.
The SFO said it carried out a thorough investigation into lowballing but concluded that the test for prosecution was not met.
The Federal Reserve declined to comment. But in a statement from 2012, it said it had received âoccasional anecdotal reports from Barclays of problems with Liborâ in 2007, and shared suggestions for reform with relevant UK authorities.
Libor is currently being replaced with a different method of setting market interest rates.
Reported by the BBC.
