Carlo Palombo will not be getting another job in financial services. The 47 year-old ex-Barclays vice president and senior trader had his criminal conviction for conspiracy defraud by manipulating the EURIBOR rate overturned last month. The UK Financial Conduct Authority subsequently revoked its ban on him working in the industry. If he wanted, Palombo could potentially try to find a new role. He doesn’t want to; he’s more interested in philosophy instead.
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Even before he was fired and accused of fraud 19 years ago, Palombo says he’d decided that working in trading wasn’t for him. “I was already leaving Barclays,” he tells us. “I wanted a break from banking. I wanted to go back to academia and study philosophy and critical theory.”
Like many in financial services, Palombo says he became a trader by default rather than design. He studied economics at university in Italy and applied to financial services jobs as a means of moving to London. “All the other graduate jobs I was looking at were based in Milan, which did not feel as exciting,” he says.
Palombo joined Barclays as a trainee in 2006. He worked under Philippe Moryoussef, a senior trader, on the European rates derivative desk. In Palombo’s own estimation, he was an awkward colleague. “Things at Barclays had been unpleasant, as I felt there was no space for questioning their business practices,” he says. He resigned. Then Barclays fired him. Then he found out that he was being prosecuted. Then he was convicted and went to prison.
Like Tom Hayes , whose conviction was also overturned last month, Palombo wasn’t in a gentle white collar jail. He spent two years in Wandsworth, a Victorian prison in London that houses category B offenders who have committed serious violent assaults or drug crimes. In its most recent inspection last year, the prisons inspectorate found Wandsworth to be unsafe; seven prisoners had killed themselves in the 12 months preceding its visit.
While Palombo was there, he completed a PhD. His thesis was unironically titled, “‘Nudity and Disorder. Adventures in Posthumanist Freedom.’” “I focus on freedom as disorder – as the opening of new possibilities of thinking and acting outside of the established order,” he tells us. Palombo’s passion is for “non-sanctioned nudity as a rupturing the established order.” – “I explore what happens in practice when individuals challenge the established societal order they exist in.”
Palombo’s prison time was therefore spent reading, writing and scribbling notes in a pad while his cellmates watched relentless daytime TV. “They just thought I was weird,” he says. “They didn’t even vaguely understand what I was doing. Most people I met were in prison for drug dealing.”
Palombo’s marriage survived his time in prison. When he left Barclays, he and his wife had moved to America, where he was teaching at a university in California, but when he was convicted in the UK, his wife moved back to England to be close to him. She was pregnant with their daughter, who was born while he was in prison. Palombo only saw his daughter in Wandsworth two or three times before COVID and then the prison was locked down. His traumatised wife was left to raise the baby alone. “There was no support whatsoever during COVID and she was stuck at home with this little thing.”
Palombo has always maintained that he did nothing wrong: “The stuff I was put in prison for was done by absolutely everyone in my area of the bank as normal business practice.” He suggests this is why no one from Barclays has ever been in touch. Not when he was fired, not when he was arrested, not when he was imprisoned, and not when he was finally pardoned last month. “I had some good friends there but they were all really scared,” he says. “When I was found guilty of fraud, it meant that everyone in my team and in the neighbouring teams was guilty of the same thing…It’s one of the things I learned from this experience: when people are scared, they are prepared to do anything to others in other to save themselves.”
Palombo advises other young traders to watch their backs. “I never did anything dodgy,” he tells us. “I was always super clean. Yet, a bank can always do what Barclays did to me – to find an alleged irregularity or potentially/morally-inappropriate business practice many years after the facts and then claim that you should have told your bosses that they were asking you to do something inappropriate.”
Avoiding this kind of risk is almost impossible, admits Palombo. Junior traders who are asked to do potentially inappropriate things as part of their job descriptions effectively need to consider that in 20 years time they might be held responsible for not convincing their bosses to act differently.
If anything, Palombo says it probably makes sense to just do things without any questions. ““I complained a lot at work and I believe this made me a target. The more sensible advice is maybe just to play the game, keep your head down, don’t complain, don’t report your bosses, obey. Those people were all promoted, and of course none were charged in relation to the Libor/Euribor cases. Barclays protected them.”
Since coming out of prison in 2022, Palombo has devoted his time to overturning his conviction. Now that he’s succeeded, he’s free to do what he likes. That’s not as easy as it seems. “My wife and our families have been supporting me. I now have to decide what to do with my life,” he tells us.
There may be compensation, but that’s not certain. One thing that is for sure is that Palombo won’t have to pay the £750k bill he faced for the British government’s legal expenses when he was convicted. He had no money, so they gave him 12 years to find it. “I would have had to sell my home.”
Barclays declined to comment for this article.
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