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By Kirstin Ridley
LONDON, June 20 (Reuters) - The jury in the London trial offive former Barclays traders charged with conspiracy tomanipulate global Libor interest rates retired to consider itsverdict on Monday after hearing more than 10 weeks of evidence.
Stylianos Contogoulas, Jonathan Mathew, Jay Merchant, AlexPabon and Ryan Reich each deny one count of dishonestly skewingLibor, a benchmark for rates on about $450 trillion of loans andcontracts worldwide, to boost their profits and defraud othersbetween June 2005 and September 2007.
In London's third Libor trial, Britain's Serious FraudOffice (SFO) alleges the men plotted with former colleague PeterJohnson and others at Barclays to rig the London interbankoffered rate (Libor), a rate designed to reflect banks' costs ofborrowing from each other.
Johnson pleaded guilty in 2014. He has yet to be sentenced.
The jury was presented with scores of emails that NewYork-based former dollar swaps traders Merchant, Pabon and Reichand London-based junior trader Contogoulas sent to Liborsubmitters Johnson and Mathew, requesting rates that wouldbenefit their trading book.
The men told the court they had not been dishonest, thattheir bosses condoned and encouraged communication with theLondon cash desk, that they communicated on corporate messagesystems in full view of compliance staff and that banks commonlysubmitted rates with a commercial bias at the time.
But three former bosses, two of whom remain senior Barclaysexecutives, were called by the prosecution and denied under oaththey knew of trader attempts to influence Barclays' Libor rates,calling such communications improper or inappropriate.
Harry Harrison, the co-head of Barclays' non-core divisionwho now reports to Barclays CEO Jes Staley, told the court therewas a grey area when traders could have told submitters abouttheir trading positions without necessarily asking them tosubmit beneficial rates. He conceded Barclays should have hadbetter training and tighter rules on communications.
Barclays declined to comment.
Allegations that banks and brokerages attempted to rig ratessuch as Libor, the average rate at which major banks say theycan borrow funds from each other in different currencies everyday, emerged during the credit crisis in 2008.
In 2012, Barclays became the first bank to settle regulatoryallegations of rate fixing and deliberately understating, or"low-balling", rates to paint a rosier picture of its financialhealth when credit markets dried up during the credit crisis.
It paid a then-record $450 million fine.
Regulators, accused of either condoning or failing to stoprigging at the time, admitted privately they were taken aback bythe scale of a public and political backlash, which forced outformer Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond, sparked the SFOinquiry and led to Libor rules being overhauled. (Reporting by Kirstin Ridley; Editing by Keith Weir)
