199. When George Osborne Went After The Bankers, I Went To Prison

17 Aug 2025 · 35 min

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In short

The Rest Is Money - Episode 199: When George Osborne Went After The Bankers, I Went To Prison

Episode Overview In this episode of "The Rest Is Money," hosts Robert Peston and Steph McGovern interview Tom Hayes, who was convicted of market manipulation during the LIBOR scandal. The discussion dives deep into the ramifications of the financial crisis, the legal battles that ensued, and the human cost of Hayes's imprisonment. The episode reveals the complexities surrounding the banking industry's accountability and the personal toll it took on Hayes and his family.

Key Themes and Discussions

The LIBOR Scandal

  • Background: Hayes was involved in trading related to the LIBOR interest rate, which was manipulated leading to widespread financial turmoil.
  • Public Sentiment: Following the financial crisis, there was immense public anger directed at bankers, creating a political atmosphere that influenced prosecutions.

Tom Hayes's Experience

  • Imprisonment: He reflects on the profound personal impact of his conviction, including the loss of his marriage, wealth, and freedom.
  • Supreme Court Overturning: The Supreme Court recently overturned his conviction, marking a significant turn in his long legal battle.
  • Emotional Response: Hayes describes a mixture of relief and exhaustion upon hearing the news of his vindication after years of fighting in court.

Systemic Issues in Banking

  • Selective Prosecution: Hayes discusses how he was singled out in the wake of the financial crisis while many others were not held accountable.
  • Political Influence: The involvement of political figures, such as George Osborne, played a significant role in the prosecution of those involved in the LIBOR scandal.

Corporate Loyalty and Accountability

  • UBS's Role: Hayes elaborates on how UBS, his employer, did not support him during the legal proceedings and instead prioritized minimizing their own culpability.
  • Lack of Investigation: He was not interviewed during UBS's internal investigations, which he believes undermined his defense.

Personal Reflections and Transformations

  • Life in Prison: Hayes shares his experiences of prison life, including the challenges he faced and the environment around him.
  • Emotional and Spiritual Growth: He discusses how his faith and a newfound perspective transformed him during his time in prison.

Key Takeaways

  • Human Cost of Financial Crimes: The episode emphasizes the personal toll on individuals wrongfully accused and the ripple effects on families.
  • Systemic Flaws in Legal Accountability: The conversation highlights issues within the legal system regarding the prosecution of financial crimes, particularly how political motives can shape judicial outcomes.
  • Resilience and Transformation: Hayes's journey reflects themes of resilience, the quest for justice, and the possibility of personal redemption after experiencing profound loss.

Conclusion The episode concludes with a sense of hope as Tom Hayes contemplates his future and the newfound freedom he has gained. It offers a poignant reminder of the complexities involved in financial systems and the lives impacted by them.

Listeners are encouraged to reflect on the systemic issues highlighted in the episode and consider the broader implications of financial accountability and justice.

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Transcript

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0:00My net worth was probably over 4 million pounds. I lost everything. I'd lost all my possessions. I'd got divorced and, you know, what was left, I'd left my ex-wife. I was sharing sales with guys who had, like, murdered people with Mac-10 machine guns. I spent quite a bit of time in the same prison as the Hatton Garden guys, actually, for a while. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Money with me, Robert Paston. So, welcome to the second part of my interview with Tom Hayes, originally convicted of market manipulation in the LIBOR case. The Supreme Court, however, recently saying that that was an unsafe, a wrong judgment against him.

0:39First part, we focus to a large extent on the madness of the market world in which he traded and the events leading up to his imprisonment. And in part two, we're now going to delve into the astonishing human impact on him and his family. So, look, let's just start with the good news. The Supreme Court recently overturned the guilty verdict against you. Nonetheless, you've been in prison for years. How did you feel when, belatedly, your long campaign to prove that the original judgment was wrong was vindicated? A bit overwhelmed, to be honest. I mean, like, they asked me how I felt last year when I lost to the Court of Appeal again.

1:30And I said, well, the same as I've always felt, because I'm used to losing. So why don't you ask me when I've won? And then I've suddenly won. And you have all these ideas in your head about how you're going to feel and euphoric and it's amazing. And believe me, you do have some of those emotions, but largely it's just overwhelming. And it's just a sense of relief and exhaustion. Because, I mean, I've been in litigation with this thing either here or in the United States for 12 years now, since 2012, end of 2012. 13 years almost and I just felt really really tired I think I just I got told the day before on a zoom call and I just sort of slumped to the desk and just like I didn't even really have any words at that particular moment in your mind you've always or I'd always been sitting in prison cells or sitting you know waiting for the verdict thinking the ruling thinking that I would react in a certain way but nothing quite prepares you for that moment and in the same way it's so strange way it's a little bit like when I got sent to prison because nothing really prepared me for that either it's almost like an out-of-body experience.

2:38As somebody was totally immersed in covering the financial crisis it was striking to me how few of the individuals who were really responsible for the absolute catastrophe of the financial crisis ever faced criminal charges I mean, this is not in any sense to denigrate your trading prowess, but nobody in their right minds would describe you as somehow, you know, responsible for the worst financial crisis in modern history. Why do you think you were singled out as one of the very few bankers to go to prison? Our case became political. Basically, in 2011, the case was looked at by the Sirius Ford Office and they concluded it wasn't criminal.

3:23you know then George Osborne got involved in 2012 gave blockbuster funding to the SFO a new director of the SFO David Green came in largely on the promise that he was going to prosecute LIBOR I mean it was a very febrile atmosphere the zeitgeist was terrible at the time for us why did they single out LIBOR rather than much of the other reckless behaviour that took place during the financial crisis they wanted bankers to go to prison and I mean I know Ireland did manage to prosecute a few people but in reality it's quite hard i mean sometimes you can have things go wrong and it's like systemically they go wrong and then you're trying to find like one person or two people or three people or however many people to blame for that systemic thing going wrong and i think in the we don't we didn't really have a law of gross negligence then that could have been applied to some of the people who made the big decisions no and that's why no one really got prosecuted quote unquote for the financial crisis um and you know that but there was this general thing well bankers are bad and and then the politicians jumped on the libel thing really in my mind showing a massive amount of ignorance about what libel really was and how it was set and i was i mean i was sitting in 2012 listening to people in parliament like clive efford mp saying that you know what i did was akin to treason that i was a crook of the first order that these people should be in prison you know like and that that a very and you were mentioned by name in parliament were in select committee hearings yeah for sure i'm not sure in parliament itself but yeah um and you know i i also listen to lots of lies being told at various select committee hearings by various different parties um and it's uh it and then the governor of the bank of england mark carney gave a speech, a Mansion House speech, during my trial that was so inflammatory that we had to discuss in court about what we should say to the jury about what was being said.

5:20I mean, and he knew I was on trial. Everybody knew I was on trial. I mean, it was a very, you know, like, that atmosphere was so politically charged. And I think I said in my press conference, there were people still sitting as MPs now who should be ashamed of what they did prior to me having a fair and unbiased criminal trial where MPs haven't got involved and they shouldn't have been involved and they shouldn't have been talking about a subject matter about which they knew nothing, frankly, just to make political capital. George Osborne had a stock phrase, we're taking from the worst in society to give the best in society in relation to the bank fines.

5:57And he came back to that phrase again and again and again. I thought, mate, you don't even know what you're talking about. But we had to shut up. We were told by our lawyers to say nothing to anybody. So we let this false narrative start and we never contradicted it. We never got our side of the story out. And this whole thing was just carried out on this false premise. And then when the Court of Appeal realised that everything, they'd got it wrong, they continued to perform like, you know, legal gymnastics to, you know, uphold our convictions. And the ground that I won on at the Supreme Court, I ran that same ground with the Court of Appeal in 2015, 10 years ago, and they prevented me from going up to the Supreme Court.

6:38And if I'd gone to the Supreme Court 10 years ago, I wouldn't have spent five and a half years in prison. I might have had a retrial and I'm confident I could have won that retrial. But, yeah, the system's broken anyway. Tell me about UBS. Did they stand by you? No. One of the things that I think has really come out of this set of events for all of the traders is that what happens is when these things happen, And they effectively have cleanup teams at these big third party councils that are instructed by banks. And the cleanup team is basically brought in to sort of, you know, minimize the number of fines, you know, reduce the culpability at the head of the organization, run the investigation.

7:19But the investigation is in the words of the judge in America that the investigation was outsourced to Deutsche Bank in that case. In my case, it was outsourced to UBS and therefore their third party council. You know, Andy Verity from the BBC quite aptly described it as asking a burglar to dust for their own fingerprints. You know, they're a suspect in the case. And basically they went round UBS as this first early mover cooperator, making proffers to every regulatory and prosecutorial body globally, Canada, USA, Japan, Australia, UK, wherever. And part of that deal making process, if you like, was to give them some people to chuck in prison.

8:00And I was the person that, I was the chief person that UBS could decide that they wanted to throw in prison. So even though you'd made 300 million for them. Yeah. They had, they felt they had no loyalty to you. Well, they had an internal investigation, which I, where I wasn't even interviewed, which given that I was supposedly the chief protagonist, you'd think that someone would have spoken to me. but I don't want to hear what I've got to say because all I'm going to say, well, my managers knew, his managers knew, his managers knew, you know, and like how have I done something that I shouldn't or I ought not to have done?

8:37I mean, UBS had their own internal IT system set up to optimize the setting of the rates commercially. And that was set up for dollars, euros and sterling. And but it wasn't set up for yen, which is why you have me sending an email saying, can you set it high or can you set it low? and that was to a submitter who in the main really didn't like me and might occasionally pay some attention to me and might occasionally not. But what UBS did in terms of the disclosure process, 12 million documents hidden in Switzerland that we couldn't get our hands on and don't forget the libel submitters at UBS sat in Switzerland.

9:13The whole thing was really scandalous the way that that bank behaved towards me. Do you think there was a bit of them thinking, well, Tomei's made a ton of money and you know caveat emptor um i mean well unfortunately because i never got hold of my p &l for my trial one of the things i wanted to show was i wanted to do a regression analysis like so have a look at what libel moved by every day and have a look at how much my p &l moved by because if my p &l was um like solely reliant on where libel was fixing on a day-to-day basis which it wasn't it was part of it for sure yeah then you'd expect on days where libel didn't move my p &l should be more or less zero and days where it did move a higher or lower by a large amount i should have large p &l swings yeah i wasn't able to do that analysis because ubs i you know never disclosed my daily profit and loss and the court never asked for it to be um disclosed because they said i didn't need it um but i would have imagined having knowing the book as i know my book i probably if that correlation analysis would have given me some sort of like i don't know five percent correlation so for every hundred million i was earning five million was maybe as a result of the libel fix moving a particular way on a particular day and what was the round Well, that's just profit and loss from, one, making markets, and two, taking risk.

10:28So, you know, I mean, obviously, I'm sat there doing, I would say, on average, I was probably doing two to 250 trades a day. You know, I was making markets for the street. So, you know, I would be providing the liquidity for them. So they'd want a two-way price, you know, and, you know, if you make enough two-way prices, you get people crossing your spread. The fair value is 100. Someone pays you 105. Then someone sells to you at 95, you know, and rinse and repeat. And just to be clear, this is all, so you obviously have, you're obviously numerous, you have a sort of, you know, this is all your intellectual prowess, basically.

11:04I could have gone and made that market for a different bank. That's why, and my jury, I mean, this is why this, allegations of avarice really annoy me, because in 2008, Goldman Sachs offered me$5 million as a golden hello to go and work for Goldman's. and I turned it down and I stayed at UBS for half the amount of money. But the problem is if you're talking to a jury and you say, well, I was offered$5 million but I stayed for$2.5 million, for a jury those sums are still unimaginably large, it's like winning the lottery. But so much of what you did then today would be essentially automated, but this was all you.

11:38Yeah, that was me. Yeah, I mean, I think more and more of it now is algorithmically automated. automated some of it some of it not so much because um because it's uh the some of the dates and the products were sort of over the counter and so relatively specific so you couldn't really automate that in quite the same way but I've been out of the market for 15 years or 14 years so um I'm sure things have really changed quite significantly in that time period yeah and how did you get into it in the first place what is what was your natural talent that got you in there Well, my overdraft got me in, actually, because I had an overdraft after the first year of university, and I worked 80 hours a week behind a bar for£2.70 an hour, and I came back with£200 every week, and I just thought there's got to be an easier way to make some money.

12:24So I went and got an internship at UBS. And then so that was basically, so then instead of earning£200 a week, I was earning£650 a week and feeling quite good about myself. And so then it just sort of, that's how it happens. I think a lot of people end up... Who spotted your... You obviously had natural talent. Who spotted that? The thing is about talent in banking is you don't really get spotted. You get given a book and you get given risk and you get given the opportunity to make or lose money. Right. And then the spotting of the talent is... But why would they take that risk on? Because, well...

12:59Risk with you, as it were. Why would they give you a pot of money to trade rather than somebody else? Well, I mean, that's what the recruitment process is at banks. It's funny you should say that because I remember when I was going to Goldman's, I said to Wade-san, who ran Goldman's Japan, I said, you're giving me all this money to come here. I said, but what if I lose your money? And he said, you're my trade. He said, you go in and trade every day, but you're my trade. My trade is to pick the right people to try and make the money. And then I said, I'm not sure. Coming here, it's like leaving your girlfriend.

13:31And he said, Tom, it's like leaving your girlfriend because you've met your future wife. um and uh and i um i still didn't move but it's um i mean so you get given this opportunity yeah which is somebody's judgment call but then you start small and it's very transparent you're it's in terms of like spotting it somebody's looking at your number every day it's black or red yeah it's big or small you know so you'd have to be like a grade a moron not to be able to work out how well someone's doing by looking at that number each day and how did you get into yen It just got fortuitous. It just got given yen.

14:07And then I moved to Tokyo because the Bank of Japan ended its zero interest rate policy in about 2005. So they had no short-dated rates. But I traded dollar short-dated and yen short-dated rates. And so then suddenly no one had traded any short-dated interest rates in Japan for like the best part of 15 years. And so I moved over to Tokyo in sort of early 06. And were you effectively the market leader for a period? In my part of the interest rate curve, so the very short-dated stuff, yeah. I did a large, because I was basically making so many markets. When Lehman's went down, I think I was the only person on the street making two-way prices because the liquidity was just that bad.

14:46I mean, other people might remember it differently, but yeah, that's what I did. I mean, the thing was, the problem was, the better I became and the more money I became, the more arrogant I became. And probably I was not a good person, if I'm honest with you. What do you mean by that? Well, it changed me. You know, like you think that your successes are your successes and you become arrogant and rude for want of a better word. And like, you know, I look back at the way I was and I look back at the way I am now and the way this set of events has shaped me. And actually, I'm a very different person to the person who I was in 2010 and particularly 2015 when I went to prison.

15:28so was all that money and in a sense the adrenaline was it of of of trading was it corrupting i mean there's a lot of alcoholism in the city it's a lot of drug use in the city because the thing is he's sort of like you have to try and stay emotionally stable because he's euphoric highs and you know like also very low very deep lows um and so trying to keep stay emotionally stable when your P &L is swinging around like massively, particularly in really volatile markets. This is a real challenge. So how many hours nonstop are you doing this, as it were, trading? Well, I mean, the thing is, you never turn off when you're trading because I go home at, say, 7 p.m., New York's open.

16:10So when I went home in Tokyo, London was open and then New York opened. And then I'll be getting a call at three in the morning because something had happened in New York. You know, non-farm payrolls, which is the employee numbers in the States, you know, would be coming out at like 10 or 11 p.m. in Tokyo. And you could trade from anywhere, could you? Yeah, I actually had the permissions to trade from, and also I could call up the London office, I could ask them to do stuff for me. I mean, I remember going on holiday once, and the markets were really volatile. I went for dinner with my then wife, and literally the next day I asked if we'd gone for dinner together because I couldn't remember it because I'd been so, I'd just been like literally on my BlackBerry because this was back in the day when BlackBerrys were a thing, you know um looking at what the market was doing and so you know you never really turn off the weekends were sort of a bit of at that time where the market was shut but you're still at the whim of global events you know if there's an earthquake or if there's you know some sort of like event that's going to affect the way the markets open on sunday night you know you're still sat there thinking about it worrying about it and so the only time i really turned off i suppose was when you squared your book up towards the end of the calendar year before the next calendar year started and it was december and you went away for on holiday in december the markets were shut your book was sort of squarish you know and then you could sort of think okay i don't have any active risk right now i'm going on holiday um you know that's when you sort of turned off of it i mean you made good money but when you look at it now that period does it feel like a nightmare or does it how do you what do you think about it no i loved it i'm really gutted that i'm not still doing it would you like to still be back in the market i'm not sure i got asked that the other day i'm not sure i'd be going back in for the right reasons now um what does that mean what do you mean not the right well i mean why why so right now if i went if i was to go back and i wouldn't want to work for another bank so i mean i'd go back maybe work for a fund the family office whatever there's those sort of options open to me am i doing it to to make a point to prove a point that i can do this and this was like you know like what happened to me was just ludicrous or am i doing it for because i'm trying to find self-fulfillment or am i doing it you know what is the apps and this is what i haven't identified what would be the reason the really deep reason for me to do it because this process has changed me um and as i mean it's a it's a funny thing trading tell us how have you changed well i mean i lost everything i mean i lost i lost everything so you lost all your money well i mean between i mean between the judge taking it off me between So let's just say, by the time you're arrested, how much by that point did you made?

18:45I'm like, personally, I was a 30-year-old, and I was probably, my net worth was probably over£4 million, you know, so I didn't, I had enough money to sort of, if I'd wanted to live the rest of my life and do nothing, I could have done that. But I had lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic, because I had this indictment in the States. And you had to pay for everything, no support from any bank? Well, I mean, until they... No, no, no, none of the banks gave me anything. And then until they froze my assets, and then I had to go on legal aid. So I spent large amounts on private... They froze your assets?

19:17Yeah. Well, because they said they were ill-gotten in some way, didn't they? They can do that as part of proceeds. I was the only trader who had his assets restrained. But that was all done, only done in response to me dropping out of the cooperation programme. Right. And when that happened, they froze my assets. They froze my then-wife's assets. They said she had a false name and a false address. turned up at her law firm's office to serve her with restraint papers. This is your wife? My ex-wife, yeah. Again, that's just to put pressure on your family. In the end, it was all done in an ex-parte hearing and then the judge actually worked out that she didn't have a false name, she didn't have a false address and she wasn't committing any...

19:52She was a lawyer? Yeah, a corporate lawyer. Sherman and Sterling at the time, yeah. They turned up at their offices. That's so humiliating for her. Well, that's precisely why they were doing it. And then somebody, I know not who, reported her to the solicitor's regulator authority to try and get her fired. But this is all part of a game where they try and put pressure on your family. My parents... This is all about wanting you to plead guilty. Yeah. My parents, their house was raided at seven in the morning by police who were supposedly looking for an absconded murderer who'd absconded in the early 90s.

20:26What? And I was thinking, you're the police. You know that if there's a matching name, it's not the same individual because you can work that out really easy. My mum said, oh, it was terribly embarrassing. They were so embarrassed. I was thinking, yeah, because they've just gone to shake down a couple of elderly people. She said, we showed them our marriage certificate and then they were fine and they went on their way. I'm thinking, this is all public record. There's no way the police don't know that you are not an absconded murderer who's disappeared from prison in the early 90s. I said, were they wearing stab vests, mum?

20:54Because they were wearing stab vests when they came to arrest me. And she said, oh, no, they weren't wearing stab vests. I said, this is just ludicrous. I mean, but thankfully she was largely immune to the whole thing because she just thought it was some tragic mistake, which I guess was the better thing for her to have thought or believed. But nothing can compensate you for the time you've lost. Nothing can compensate you for the relationships you've lost. Nothing can compensate me for the time. Five and a half years of my son's life that I lost. You know, this whole episode has taken 13 years of my life.

21:23you know uh that you know there's no you can't quantifiably put some sort of value on any of that i think at one point you know i'd literally i'd lost all my possessions i'd got divorced and you know i what was left i'd left to my ex-wife and i i literally i was starting again starting completely again and i had i had a wardrobe of clothes um you know i had my phone and a laptop and that was really that was that was the sum of my material possessions but you know what I had that was way more important than those things I was free I was reasonably healthy I had family and friends who are fantastic and I was just surrounded by the every day it's it's it's hard to describe somebody who hasn't lost their liberty but every day we are so blessed so I went to St Ives on holiday with my son whilst I was on holiday with my friend with my son in St Ives we met up with a friend of mine who's been recently released from prison and my friend um did murder someone and did bury them in a wood but you know has been rehabilitated and was one of my best friends in prison and we went out and we had uh we had a meal in St Ives overlooking the sea and the beach and both he and I were just sat there talking about the absolute amazement we had that we could eat amazing foods look out over a coast you know feel the sand under our feet all the sorts of little things that I just previously always took for granted like now just going on a train journey and looking out the window and just thinking isn't this fantastic you know there's so many amazing things that happen to us every day and every day I can just thank the Lord and feel the blessings that I have for all those little amazing things which previously you know what I never cared about and I never even noticed.

23:12Tom we're only part of the way through this story. We're going to continue it after the break.

23:43And when you were in prison, had you been in a prison in your life? No, well, I got put in a segregation unit. What's that? Well, it's a unit which is primarily designed as punishment, basically because you're completely segregated. You don't see other prisoners. But you're on your own. You're on your own. You're not in the general... It's what people think of as the isolation unit. It is the isolation unit. It's segregation, yeah. You're segregated from the rest of the population. And that was for my own protection because I'd been the first item on the news and this, that and the other. One thing the prison service hates is publicity.

24:13so if you're not famous or infamous I should say they don't care if you get beaten up but if you were like me you could end up in the press and they hate that so that's why I was put in segregation and I was in seg for like two weeks and then I got transferred to a high security prison up in the Midlands which was that one? Loudum Grange that was a high security B-cat what does that mean B-cat? the prison system allocates you according to your level of risk so you know risk to other prisoners or well um well risk of escape um risk to other prisoners severity of your crime you know and so they have categories you're high risk medium risk lower risk and i was deemed to be high risk uh so i was in prison with i was sharing sales with guys who like murdered people with mac 10 machine guns um i spent quite a bit of time in the same prison as the Hatton Garden guys actually for a while.

25:13But I frequently had cellmates who were like, who'd killed people. Were you ever threatened? Actually, funny enough, not till the very end when I was in the open prison, which is bizarre, isn't it really? Which is obviously meant to be the safest of the safe places. The lower security prisons were more dangerous for me in a way because the high security prisons, you've got guys doing 30 years, they're living in the prison. For a large part, they just ignore me. I'd meant nothing to them. But it's also like your safety in prison is not really a function of the staff. It's a function of other prisoners.

25:49So I remember getting to that high security prison after two weeks and I went up to the office on the wing and the guy sat me down, obviously realised that I knew nothing about prison. I was such an atypical prisoner. And so he called in this other guy who came. He was about six foot six. And he said, right, you, pointing at him, look after him, pointing at me. And I thought, why is this big guy going to be looking after me? But what he knew is he knew that that sort of guy was in charge, sort of ran the wing, if you like. And he knew that if that guy said no one touches him, then I would be OK.

26:23And I was always OK, because that guy had obviously just said to other people, don't touch him. What happened in the open prison? You said you were threatened in the end. Yeah, that was my cellmate. Yeah, I was throttled. but I mean it was one of those things where he'd said something about my then wife before she told me she wanted to leave me and it was only really then I mean I reacted in a way that I shouldn't and I then said some very nasty things about him that I regret saying and he reacted by trying to throttle me but I just left it because you know he was on a parole sentence it could have meant that he'd stayed in prison for a couple more years.

27:04And so I just, you know, just, it was the only time I was, anyone physically laid a hand on me. I mean, I, there were lots, I saw lots and lots of violence, so much so that it just sort of became normalised. You know, when people died from suicides or drug overdoses, you know, you're my, my, at the start I was shocked, but then by the end I was just like, oh, now I can't put my washing on. You know, why did they choose to do it today or whatever? The coroner now needs to come in. I mean, and you get some crazy, there's a guy below me, He died from a spice overdose, which is a drug frequently taken in prison.

27:36And some of the junkies came out the next day and were like, oh, where do we get some of that stuff? It must be really strong. And I'm just like, that's just killed a man. Like, really, why do you want to take that? But that's the way, I mean, I've seen people go into prison being completely clean of drugs and become completely addicted. And it destroyed them as characters. Because some people can't, they haven't got the mental fortitude or strength to deal with prison. And so they resort to taking drugs. And how did you stay sane? My faith. I became a Christian in prison. And I used to be extremely angry, extremely bitter.

28:09And it was just eating me up inside. And I had to deal with that. And I remember going to... I went to some prayer sessions because I just wanted to get off the wing because the sounds and the smell and the atmosphere of a prison wing is something that only someone in prison can really understand. but going to the chapel was a bit of serenity, a bit of peace, a bit of normality and some people from the Riverside Church in Derby who I'd love to catch up with one day and thank them would come in to do some prayer sessions that were part of the prison fellowship and they said to me, Tom, you've got to get rid of this anger it's just killing you, you're so bitter about everything and I wasn't a Christian at that stage and so they asked me to write letters to all the people I was angry with so like top of my list was the judge and there's the various other people who i knew had lied at my trial so i wrote the letters i never sent them but it was quite cathartic for me to write them and then i came back the next week with the letters and i read them the letters and they said right now tom we we're all going to pray for these people and i was like what i'm going to say a prayer for these guys you know but i was so but at that process they took me through it was it gave me real freedom it was like the weight was lifted off my shoulders when I was able to say I don't hate that person anymore I don't want bad things to happen to that person anymore you know I'm not going to be eaten up and bitter by what that person did to me anymore it was just it felt so amazing and I saw a quote from Nelson Mandela that is like you know anger's like drinking poison and thinking it's going to kill the other person and actually I think that's so true because I was just walking around in such rage all the time.

29:50And it really helped me. And then later on, you know, I became, you know, faith found me and I became a committed Christian. I still go to church every week and I try to live my life as well as in the best way that I can. I'm not perfect by a long stretch of the imagination, but that's really God and the Lord and the faith that I found in prison got me through that very difficult period of time, really. So what next for you? What are you going to do? You know, everyone's asked me that in the last week or two. It's actually the hardest question to answer because for 12 years, I've had to live my life on this 24-hour basis where I can't really plan because I'm facing a big criminal trial or I'm in prison or I'm running all these appeals and I'm on probation.

30:42And, you know, you just can't plan anything. Yeah. And so suddenly somebody says you're free and the vista of freedom opens up before you with this panoply of choice. And you're sat there thinking, well, it's sort of paradoxical. Now I've got so much choice. What am I going to do? And the analogy I would use is if you're given a menu with loads of your favourite dishes on it and someone says, what are you going to have to eat? It's much harder to choose what you're going to have to eat when everything on there you really like. it's taking a little bit of time to get used to being free it's taking a little bit of time to you know work out what i want to do um i'd like to go abroad go on a holiday i'm no longer on an interpol red list so i'm not an international you've got a passport yet i've got a passport yeah but i'm not on i was i was an international fugitive for a while so i like they would have arrested me on on this interpol red list so actually i quite miss being able to tell people i'm an international fugitive because that was quite cool well look i'm relieved that you don't have to tell people that anymore and you know i hope you'll you'll pick the most delicious dish on the menu that you've got in front of you tom thank you so much for coming in and sharing your story that was absolutely compelling and uh i mean i don't say this to uh many people because i don't have to given the nature of what they've been through but good luck with the rest of your life and that's it for this edition of the rest is money with me or person goodbye

From the publisher

Who were the traders who took the hit when the public turned on the City after the financial crisis? How did Tom Hayes lose his marriage, all his savings and his freedom in a case that has since been over-turned by the Supreme Court? Why will he get no compensation?

In the second part of this two-episode interview, Robert talks to Tom Hayes about how he lost everything when he took the rap for the flaws in the LIbor interest rate system.

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