Rigged: The Incredible True Story of the Whistleblowers Jailed after Exposing the Rotten Heart of the Financial System

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This book matters, because the integrity of our judicial system is something that’s also worth fighting for.

In the US, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had gone under; in the UK, Northern Rock and RBS had to be rescued by the state.

A new book, exclusively serialised in The Times, claims that investigating agencies, including the FBI in the United States and Britain’s financial regulator, were told in November 2010 of an international drive to get Libor and Euribor rates down, regardless of the real cost of borrowing cash. Before 2017, the legal test for dishonesty under Ghosh required juries to consider whether the defendant was acting dishonestly according to the standards of ordinary reasonable people and whether the defendant realised that what they were doing was dishonest by those standards.

They remain the only bankers jailed since the 2008 financial crisis – and they’re innocent of the crimes of which they are accused.Andy Verity BBC Economics correspondent and author of the book Rigged joined Joe on the show this morning. He has broadcast and published high-impact investigative stories on the Libor scandal, including a Panorama film on the Bank of England's role and 'The Lowball Tapes', an explosive podcast. To save themselves from collapse, nationalization and loss of bonuses, banks and financial institutions conspire to rig Libor so it stays artificially low, a criminal practice known as lowballing.

In the sense that so many have conspired to conceal this "low-balling" criminality for so long, I can scarcely comprehend what I have just read. The fact sheet goes on to provide ‘dishonest practices in financial markets’ as one example of a way employees can commit fraud. Don’t just read this book – let it become the spark that lights the fire within YOU to campaign for the kind of positive, progressive and purposeful reforms that are so desperately needed. He can currently be heard on the UK's Today program, Radio Four’s six o’clock news and the BBC News TV channel. Andy Verity is the award-winning economics correspondent for BBC News, covering finance and business on the BBC radio and TV bulletins as well as reporting for Panorama , BBC Newsnight and BBC Radio 4’s investigative strand, File on Four .

Following the acquittal of two former Barclay's traders last week, reporter Andy Verity asks if the right people are being prosecuted for the Libor scandal. One of them, a promising young financier by the name of Rishi Sunak, left for California the following year.

Following rulings by the Supreme Court In Ivey v Genting Casinos and the Court of Appeal in Barton in 2020, the test for dishonesty now requires a jury to consider what facts the accused actually knew or believed at the time, and whether their conduct was dishonest when viewed by the standards of ordinary people. However, this book outlines (in superb detail) something even worse: a frankly unbelievable collusion and scapegoating mission, involving big banks, regulators, judiciary, lawyers and media. If they floated, they were considered guilty because they had rejected their baptism, so the water rejected them. The alleged witches were tied up so they could not swim when they were thrown into the pond as it is written.Andy is the award-winning economics correspondent for BBC News, covering finance and business on the BBC radio and TV bulletins as well as reporting for Panorama, BBC Newsnight and BBC Radio 4’s investigative strand, File on Four. Fred Goodwin and James Crosby, the CEOs of RBS and HBOS respectively, lost their knighthoods – a process known as degradation – but no banker was imprisoned in the UK for having caused the crisis.