The perimeter of HMP Lowdham Grange is secured by an absolutely huge wall. From his tiny cell inside the prison, Tom Hayes can see the trees that grow on the other side of the wall; he is witnessing the leaves on those trees turn from green to gold for a second time. Tom has now been incarcerated in a high security prison for 60 weeks, imprisoned for behaviour that was not a criminal offence at the time, tried using judge-made law retrospectively imposed by our courts in the midst of a political and media furore to punish a “banker”, and the unlucky recipient of a “deterrent” sentence longer than some people get for killing someone.
Tom’s trial was the ultimate show trial: so much defence evidence was simply not allowed before Tom’s jury; his Autistic Spectrum Condition was deemed irrelevant and no medical evidence was admissible; the prosecution did not interview a single other person from UBS, his former employer, and did not interview any of the people Tom worked with regularly in Japan whilst employed at Citibank. Putting it bluntly, Tom Hayes was framed. And everyone looked the other way while it happened right under their noses.
As if that isn’t bad enough, Tom was then put before a judge that made new law completely incompatible with the way a market functions, and then applied that law to Tom retrospectively. The judge also unexpectedly changed the case in law halfway through the trial, after the prosecution had finished presenting their evidence. The pre-trial issues with the judge had been serious enough to merit Tom making an application to have the judge removed from his case, but unfortunately the application had to be made to that judge himself, and you can guess what his decision was. The outcome: a 14 year prison sentence for absolutely correct LIBOR rates, rates that could be independently tested if anyone anywhere actually cared about the truth behind the LIBOR trials.
Tom’s family are fighting for a new appeal in order to combat the inherent unfairness in the SFO’s investigation and the subsequent criminal trial. The THSG has managed to raise just over £77,000 to pay Tom’s new legal team to prepare an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The application is in progress and is the first step in our mission to get back before the Court of Appeal to explain to them why Tom is innocent and a major miscarriage of justice has occurred.
In other developments, Professor Penny Cooper and Dr Clare Allely have just published an article entitled “The Curious Incident of the Man in the Bank” in Criminal Law & Justice. The article examines some of the failings concerning the Asperger’s elements of Tom’s case, as well as examining issues relevant to Autistic Spectrum Condition and other vulnerable defendants generally. You can read the article here:
THSG
Tom Hayes Support Group 