Tom Hayes Takes On UBS in a $400 Million Fight to Rewrite the Libor Scandal’s Legacy
The Scapegoat’s Reckoning: Tom Hayes Takes On UBS in a $400 Million Fight to Rewrite the Libor Scandal’s Legacy
STAMFORD, Conn. – More than ten years after being branded the mastermind behind one of the most notorious financial scandals in history, former UBS trader Tom Hayes is striking back. This week, he filed a $400 million lawsuit in Connecticut state court, accusing UBS of malicious prosecution and of deliberately throwing him to the wolves to protect itself.
Hayes, once painted as the villain of the Libor scandal, says he was no criminal genius but a convenient scapegoat. His lawsuit claims UBS sacrificed him to shield top executives and preserve the bank’s reputation when regulators came knocking. In his words, they “offered him up on a silver platter.”
For Hayes, this isn’t just about money—it’s about redemption. After spending more than five years in a British prison, his conviction was overturned this summer. Now, he’s trying to rewrite the story that defined his life. For UBS, the case reopens an ugly chapter it believed was long buried, threatening to expose how the bank managed its role in one of finance’s darkest sagas.
At the heart of Hayes’s claim is a bold assertion: he wasn’t a rogue trader, but a cog in a machine that openly encouraged rate manipulation. According to the lawsuit, efforts to influence the London Interbank Offered Rate—or Libor—weren’t secret schemes. They were standard practice, tolerated and even rewarded at UBS. Hayes argues that when the scandal broke, the bank painted him as a lone bad actor to appease furious regulators in the U.S. and the U.K.
To win a malicious prosecution case under Connecticut law, Hayes must prove UBS helped launch the case against him without probable cause, acted out of malice, and that the prosecution ended in his favor. It’s a steep climb—but he believes the record is on his side.
“UBS destroyed my reputation and career,” Hayes said in a statement. “I’m ready to put my case before a jury and let them see the truth behind what really happened.”
UBS, headquartered in Zurich but with a major base in Stamford, declined to comment, a move that’s typical before a formal legal response—likely a motion to dismiss—hits the docket.
A Conviction Overturned
The timing of Hayes’s lawsuit is no accident. It comes just months after the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court shook the foundations of the Libor narrative by overturning his conviction. In July 2025, the court ruled that the trial judge had misdirected the jury on what legally counts as “dishonesty,” making the original verdict unsafe.
That ruling gives Hayes exactly what he needed—a “favorable termination” of his criminal case—to pursue this civil claim. His lawyers will argue that the prosecution never had solid evidence and that UBS’s cooperation with authorities built the case on a flawed foundation.
Still, the road ahead isn’t smooth. The same Supreme Court ruling that freed Hayes also noted there was “ample evidence” a properly instructed jury could still have found him guilty. British prosecutors decided not to retry him, saying it wasn’t in the public interest to reopen the decade-old case.
UBS will likely lean on that point. Its attorneys are expected to argue that the very existence of evidence justifying prosecution means there was probable cause. They’ll also say the bank acted in good faith, fulfilling its duty to law enforcement—and that its cooperation earned it leniency from U.S. prosecutors, not because of deceit, but because it played by the rules.
A Paper Trail of Contradictions
The story of UBS’s own wrongdoing isn’t buried. It’s written in court records. Back in December 2012, UBS Securities Japan pleaded guilty to wire fraud in the U.S. for manipulating interest rates, including Yen Libor. The Department of Justice explicitly named Hayes as a key player in the scheme. Meanwhile, UBS AG, the parent company, avoided criminal prosecution by signing a non-prosecution agreement and paying $1.5 billion in fines across three countries.
Hayes’s new lawsuit paints a different picture. He claims the bank’s so-called cooperation wasn’t about truth or justice—it was about survival. He alleges UBS crafted a story that isolated blame on a few traders while protecting the higher-ups who encouraged or ignored the behavior.
The $400 million Hayes seeks covers not just lost income, but the destruction of his reputation, years behind bars, and the personal devastation that followed. His suit demands both compensatory and punitive damages—money to make him whole and punishment to deter corporate scapegoating.
As of Monday night, the full complaint hadn’t yet appeared on the Connecticut Judicial Branch’s public docket, but summaries in legal publications shed light on its contents. Hayes’s team chose Connecticut deliberately—UBS has a strong presence there, and the state has handled big financial cases before. The bank will almost certainly try to move the lawsuit to federal court, where it may expect friendlier ground.
For years, Hayes insisted he was singled out. As other traders walked free and other Libor cases collapsed, he kept fighting to clear his name. Now, with his conviction overturned and his case reborn, the man once labeled the face of financial greed is turning the accusation on its head—claiming the real manipulation wasn’t of interest rates, but of justice itself.