Ex-Barclays Trader Says Rivals ‘Corrupt’ in Setting Libor

By Jeremy Hodges, Bloomberg News

Jay Merchant, one of five former Barclays Plc traders on trial for rigging benchmark interest rates, described another bank’s Libor submission as “corrupt” in a 2006 phone call, prosecutors said.

“A bank had done what you had been doing, at this stage, for a year,” James Hines, a prosecution lawyer, said in court Tuesday referring to a transcript of the call. “You didn’t like it and people were complaining about it.”

Merchant, 45, and four of his colleagues are on trial in London, and deny accusations that they conspired to rig the London interbank offered ...