In a compassionate article, the FT’s Alastair Grey asks the questions about how Tom Hayes was pictured a freed man outside Southwark Court when 10 years before he was snapped being driven off to jail in a security van.

It is headlined

‘All the banks were lying’

Libor has since been scrapped as the way to manage interest rates in the UK. It was being manipulated, it is hard to understand how this was down to a group of young men like Tom Hayes. There are issues that go from the Banks through the PRA to the Bank of England as to how Libor was systemically rigged. The article about Hayes likens the passing of blame to the behaviour of the Post Office.

When I was in my twenties, I found myself a defendant in a month long trial in Southwark Court, there was nothing much that the jury could do but find me guilty of helping a ring of fraudsters commit mortgage fraud. I was lucky enough to get discharged by a judge who could not see what I had done as being  duped.  I said I was, I know I was. I know how Tom Hayes feels but I was lucky.

Many of my friends know of this and I have declared it every time I have taken regulatory responsibility. I cannot tell Tom Hayes that his time in prison was less than awful. He was thought by inmates to be a paedophile , so long was his sentence. He wasn’t – but he still is not considered guiltless, I know that too but I never went to prison.

We have a system of justice that finds on those like Tom Hayes, like post masters and mistresses and on others who find themselves found guilty of doing their job as they were directed to.

The issue is not with the legal system but it always seems to return to the same thing, the point of sale. For Tom Hayes the point of sale was acting for UBS in the Libor market and my heart goes out to him for what has happened.

The fault is, as the FT headline says with the banks that were lying, the same thing as the Post Office, I find though 37 years ago I still cannot write about what happened to me.

But the point is that there is a life after the disaster and that I wish Tom Hayes and those who are being allowed to walk away from the nightmare of Libor.

Thanks to the FT’s Alastair Grey. Thanks to Tom Hayes for speaking of what had to be hard to rehearse.