The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has obtained arrest warrants in its bid to bring four Germans and one Frenchman to Britain to face charges of conspiracy to rig Euribor benchmark interest rates.



James Waddington, a lawyer for the SFO, told Southwark crown court on Friday that the prosecutor had been granted European arrest warrants for former Deutsche Bank employees Kai-Uwe Kappauf, Joerg Vogt, Andreas Hauschild, Ardalan Gharagozlou and former Société Générale trader Stephane Esper.

The five men declined a requisition request to attend London’s Westminster magistrates court on 11 January, where they would have been charged with conspiracy to defraud, relating to alleged manipulation of Euribor (the euro interbank offered rate).

This threw an early obstacle in the way of SFO plans to charge 10 men and one woman with a plot to rig the Euribor which, like Libor (the London interbank offered rate), is a benchmark for rates on trillions of dollars of financial products and loans globally.

Singapore-based Christian Bittar, a former star Deutsche Bank trader, former Barclays traders Philippe Moryoussef, Colin Bermingham, Sisse Bohart, Carlo Palombo and Achim Kraemer, still employed by Deutsche, have already been charged in the world’s first Euribor prosecution.

Lawyers for Kraemer, Palombo and Bittar have previously said their clients denied the allegations, while others did not respond to requests for comment.