The Spider Network

by David Enrich

  * Wilkinson would later say that he never tried to get Goodman to skew his run-throughs inappropriately and that he often was trying to con traders or his colleagues by only appearing to help.

  * ICAP would later say that Casterton didn’t realize that the payment was related to Libor manipulation.

  * Read would later claim that he never made that phone call to Goodman and that he fabricated the whole tale in order to impress Hayes.

  * Goodman would later insist that nobody in compliance had ever spoken to him about Libor. He couldn’t even recall writing that message to Read.

  * Pieri would later deny saying this, telling regulators that he was unaware of the switch trades.

  * Wink would later deny that he had known of the switch trades or had had that conversation with Cryan.

  * The phone call was recorded, defeating the purpose of not discussing it in a written chat.

  * When Aaron submitted the Mahiki receipt for reimbursement, he made up a client. He didn’t want Danziger’s name involved.

  * When Hayes returned to Tokyo a few weeks later, Pieri apologized for the outburst. He said he had overreacted to the mounting concern inside UBS about the U.S. investigations into the dollar version of Libor. “The message I got was not to stop doing it, it was to stop e-mailing about it,” Hayes would say.

  * Thursfield would later say he didn’t realize that Bere wanted Libor moved to benefit the bank’s trading positions.

  * Years later, Thursfield would employ textbook restraint when he said of Hayes: “It would be fair to say that I did not form a high opinion of this individual.”

  * The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 2005.

  * Pete the Greek went straight to the BBA and told Ewan about the meeting. Pete’s theory—which the credulous Ewan apparently bought—was that the SEC wanted to undermine Libor’s legitimacy so that it could create its own competing interest-rate benchmark.

  * Porter would later claim that he began the lunch by warning that Citigroup wouldn’t base its Libor submissions on Hayes’s trading positions.

  * Citigroup denies that Mccappin received such a warning.

  * Citigroup denies that Mccappin made such requests.

  * Hayes would later claim that he simply thought it would be more effective if Hoshino casually approached the London colleagues in person, and that’s why he told him not to put it in writing.

  * Years later, regulators would still be searching for a convincing explanation for what caused the plunge. American authorities would criminally charge a socially awkward math whiz named Navinder Sarao as a primary culprit. Trading out of his family’s modest London home, Sarao had been using algorithms to simulate bids and offers—a strategy that prosecutors would allege had helped trigger the crash.

  * No Barclays traders had been arrested. It’s unclear what Celtik was referring to.

  * The FSA would later tell Wilkinson that his bosses had been lying—the agency had nothing to do with his suspension.

  * Williams added a caveat: “Strange things do happen.”

  * The same was true at home. One day, he was setting up an old iPhone for his son and encountered a cache of years-old materials: photos, e-mails, text messages. Dozens of the texts were with Read. Goodman alerted his lawyers, who passed the messages on to the FSA. They would become crucial pieces of evidence against the two men.

  * Barclays’s lawyers successfully negotiated to keep any clues about the executives’ identities out of the settlement documents.

  * The SFO team also got ample doses of Hayes’s oddball nature. At one point, explaining why he didn’t like to manage people, he said: “Mainly because people are variables that don’t behave in predictable ways, and, you know, they’re difficult to manage. And I’d rather manage risk than people.”

  * UBS would later say that the instructions didn’t represent official company policy and must have been created by a rogue employee.

  * Unlike in the United States, where defendants unable to afford their own lawyer are assigned a public defender, in Britain they get to pick a private lawyer who then gets reimbursed through the Legal Aid program.

  * The SFO also filed charges against seven former Barclays employees for their alleged roles in the Libor scandal, although they were unconnected to Hayes.

  * It fit into a pattern for the Hayes clan. Family members believed that Sandy’s father, Peter Hunt—a pioneer in the nascent British computing industry in the 1960s—also had autism.

  * Hayes’s father didn’t plan to attend. Nick’s presence there risked enraging Sandy and, in turn, adding to his son’s stress.

  * Kengeter says he wasn’t aware of wrongdoing at UBS.

  * The Justice Department would later drop its charges against the three former ICAP brokers.