From US$126m bonus to jail: the fall of star trader ‘Mr Basis Point’
Ex-Deutsche Bank trader pleaded guilty last Thursday over Euribor rigging three weeks before the Frenchman was due to stand trial
Christian Bittar was once among Deutsche Bank AG’s highest-paid traders, a maths whizz who earned a near 90 million-pound (US$126 million) bonus in 2008 alone. Now he is sitting in a UK prison.
The 46-year-old former star banker pleaded guilty in a London court on March 2 to conspiring to rig the interest-rate benchmark known as Euribor.
He is in custody and will be sentenced after a related trial ends this summer. A court lifted reporting restrictions on his plea Thursday.
It’s a seminal moment for UK prosecutors in their six-year investigation. Bittar, famous for receiving multimillion dollar bonuses, is one of the highest-profile traders to be convicted in the global rate-rigging probe.
“It wouldn’t be right to comment on this at the moment,” David Savell, Bittar’s lawyer at Locke Lord LLP in London, said.
When the scandal first engulfed the business world after the global financial crisis a decade ago, the initial focus was on banks, which paid about US$9 billion in fines for manipulating the London interbank offered rate and its euro counterpart.