Serious Fraud Office was seeking £2.45m from Hayes that he had been paid in bonuses

Tom Hayes, the former star trader serving an 11-year jail sentence for manipulating Libor interest rates, has been ordered to pay £878,806 after a court ruled the money was the proceeds of crime.

The Serious Fraud Office was seeking up to £2.45m from Hayes, which he was paid in bonuses while he rigged the key rate at which banks lend to each other. Justice Cooke decided that 35% of Hayes’s bonuses came from manipulating Libor.

Hayes’s main asset is a £1.7m country house, which he bought with his wife, Sarah Tighe, in 2011. Hayes sold his half of the seven-bedroom property to Tighe in 2013 for £600,000, less than its value, and the court decided this was a “tainted gift” that should be available for confiscation.

At last week’s five-day confiscation hearing at the Old Bailey, the SFO claimed Hayes’s total benefit from his criminal behaviour was £3.8m. Cooke, who also presided over Hayes’s criminal trial, decided the available amount was £1.76m.



The judge included a £4,000 Rolex Daytona watch, Tighe’s £8,899 engagement ring and £190 wedding ring, a Mercedes car worth almost £13,000 and £32,280 in a bank account.

Cooke concluded Hayes would not have been as highly regarded as he was by his employers, the investment banks UBS and Citi, if he had not successfully manipulated Libor. The measure, whose full name is the London interbank offered rate, is used to set an estimated $300tn (£212tn) of financial contracts around the world.

Hayes was convicted in August of eight counts of fraud for conspiring to fix Libor by using contacts at other banks and brokers to get daily rates reported in his favour. His sentence was cut from 14 years on appeal in December.

Cooke said Hayes would face an extra three years in prison if he did not hand over the money within three months, though he was given some leeway to sell the house. The Old Rectory in Woldingham, Surrey, is up for sale and the tenants have until the end of July to leave, the SFO said.

At Hayes’s trial, the SFO portrayed him as the ringleader of an international conspiracy to rig Libor, which was calculated by banks reporting their own borrowing costs each day to the British Bankers’ Association. In January, six brokers were found not guilty of helping Hayes and accused the SFO of scapegoating them.



The SFO said the cost of Hayes’s confiscation hearing was not yet available but Mark Thompson, head of the agency’s proceeds of crime division, said the payout was significant despite falling well short of the amount it had sought.

He said: “The court acknowledged the challenges of quantifying the benefit from crime in this case. The SFO provided the court with all the available information and the outcome is a substantial confiscation order, which Mr Hayes will need to satisfy or face a further period of imprisonment.”

Hayes, who received legal aid for the confiscation trial, may also have to pay the SFO’s costs for the confiscation hearing.

In a statement from HMP Belmarsh, Hayes said: “The Serious Fraud Office has tried to take everything from me – from my liberty to my wedding ring.”

“I vehemently maintain my innocence,” he added. “The practices for which I have been imprisoned were industry standard practice and had been for 20 years. I have every intention of telling the general public the truth about Libor and will do so at the earliest possible opportunity.”