Britain's fraud prosecutor poised to file more Libor charges

By Kirstin Ridley

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is poised to file more criminal charges in connection with its investigation into alleged rigging of benchmark interest rates after sealing the world's first Libor conviction in a jury trial on Monday.

"I have said further charges are likely ... in the autumn. Our Libor investigation is far-reaching and quite wide ... We haven't finished yet," SFO director David Green told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

Green has staked his reputation on a successful prosecution in the investigation into the suspected manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, a global benchmark for $450 trillion of financial contracts.

He declined to provide details about any new charges, such as whether they would be filed against senior staff, other individuals, or, be the first filed against a company.

"As to the direction of our investigation, or who are suspects in our sights at the moment, those are operational issues and I couldn't possibly discuss it," Green said.

He said the outcome of the trial of former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes was a "satisfactory resolution." Hayes, the first person to face a jury trial in the global Libor investigation, was sentenced to 14 years in jail after being found guilty of conspiring to rig Libor benchmark interest rates.

The hefty sentence was partly designed as a deterrent and a warning to the financial industry. Justice Jeremy Cooke said that the conduct exhibited by Hayes between 2006 and 2010 needed to be marked out as dishonest and wrong and a message had to be sent to the world of banking.

After a nine-week trial, the jury took six days to reach a unanimous guilty verdict for Hayes on eight counts of conspiracy to defraud in relation to Libor rigging.

Lawyers have described the conviction of Hayes, a former yen derivatives trader based in Tokyo, as a watershed moment in a seven-year, sprawling Libor investigation that was begun by U.S. regulators at the height of the financial crisis.

The SFO's success in this case could help to silence calls from some British politicians for the SFO to be rolled into a national FBI-style crime fighting body, lawyers say.

Some of the world's most powerful banks have paid around $9.0 billion in total in regulatory fines after Libor investigations, 21 people have been charged in Britain and the United States and four have pleaded guilty, three in the U.S. and one in Britain.

In Britain, 11 former traders and brokers are awaiting trial and one other has pleaded guilty. Of the 11, six former brokers are scheduled to stand trial in September in a case linked to Hayes. They cannot be named for legal reasons.

But no senior managers or financial institutions have been charged over Libor to date.

(Reporting by Kirstin Ridley. Editing by Jane Merriman)