A former financial trader who was jailed for 11 years has said winning his decade-long legal battle to have his convictions quashed is an “incredible feeling”.
On Wednesday the Supreme Court quashed the convictions of former Citigroup and UBS trader Tom Hayes.
In 2015 he was found guilty of multiple counts of conspiracy to defraud over manipulating the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (Libor) between 2006 and 2010.
Speaking after his convictions were overturned, Mr Hayes, who arrived at court wearing a Kenny Rogers The Gambler t-shirt, said he was not “bitter” about his experience.
He told a press conference: “I always believed that it would happen. I always had confidence it would happen.”
Mr Hayes added: “This wasn’t a gamble for me. My trial judge called me a gambler.
“So I decided today I would wear a T-shirt, a Kenny Rogers Gambler T-shirt.”
Mr Hayes added: “I’m really very grateful to the Supreme Court. We’ve had a consistent set of decisions from every other tribunal, and they were all to lose, and I got asked at my last appeal how I felt after we lost, and I said: ‘Well, ask me when we’ve won.’
“Because I knew how it feels to lose, and today I’m learning how it feels to have won, and it’s an incredible feeling.”
He added that going to prison, losing all his money, and missing out on five years of his son’s life has taught him not to value “things”.
Mr Hayes also said he became a Christian in prison, where he used to have the “angry test, because the people who were angry, were innocent, because they were so annoyed about and frustrated with the miscarriage of justice they’d gone through”.
He said: “I’m a better person today than when I went into prison. My faith really helps me overcome a lot of the anger to see myself through that sentence.
“I had a lot of stuff. Money enables you to buy more stuff and more stuff on top of that and your goal is to require more stuff again.
“But when all your stuff is taken away from you, and then your liberty is taken away from you, and your dignity gets taken away from you, and your family gets taken away from you and your children get taken away from you, what are you left with, and do you miss the stuff?
“When I got to my open prison, being able to walk on the grass barefoot and see the stars in the sky was such an amazing thing.
“Going on a train, crossing the road, and then when I got released after five-and-a-half years into Covid, walking around Regent’s Park in the snow and hearing a lion’s roar, those were just amazing things for me, it was so powerful.
“I’ve really learned what you should value in your life as a result of what’s happened to me. I’m not chasing stuff anymore.”
Mr Hayes said he did not know what he would do next, but that suddenly the “vista of freedom and choice” had opened up to him, and he would like to go and live near a large body of water.
