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

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A system that affects all of us and it is a scandal of such magnitude that it needs further investigation and I seriously hope that Ian Fraser, the author, tackles it and gets a Knighthood for it! So, even as the government worked to make money cheaper than ever, they continued to charge much higher rates for any money they actually did lend. I wish both David Davis MP and John McDonnell MP every success in their efforts to ensure that the actual truth is shared comprehensively with the wider public.

They were sentenced to huge jail terms for crimes which were at best minor, and may never have committed at all. The point of all this was to end the “credit crunch” which had imperilled the global financial system, but the financial sector remained too frightened to lend. For many years, it was common for traders to ask if the rate could be nudged in one direction or another.The government’s fact sheet states that under the new offence, an organisation will be liable where a fraud offence is committed by an employee for the organisation’s benefit, and the organisation did not have reasonable fraud prevention procedures in place. Some, such as Paul Tucker, then the deputy governor of the Bank of England, were grilled on whether they had asked institutions like Barclays to purposefully misrepresent the rates in a process known as low-balling, to hide the market's loss of trust in them.

With Andy's great investigative work and all the HARD EVIDENCE that he's now produced, the real culprits need to be investigated and punished. Andy Verity, one of the BBC's top financial reporters, exposes with shining clarity one of the greatest scandals of modern times. 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.It's a shocking extravagance, but I'm likely to find any excuse under the sun not to do my workouts unless I have someone telling me what to do and shouting at me if I don't do it. This was at the same time as dozens of former traders were criminally prosecuted for much less serious rate “manipulation”, it is claimed.

This book matters, because the integrity of our judicial system is something that’s also worth fighting for.I find it impossible to believe that the prosecuting barristers were not aware that the traders were innocent, and that they were being scapegoated. Certain people with axes to grind have jumped on the bandwagon set in motion by the BBC's Andy Verity and are aggressively promoting their view that the Bank of England's behaviour was fraudulent. Some evidence has previously emerged of Bank of England and UK government involvement in manipulation of interest rates. Even more incredibly, some were the very people who had brought the authorities' attention to the crimes in the first place.

It's "a secret history to which the public would otherwise have had no access," says Verity in the book's preface seen by POLITICO. The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) convicted a total of nine traders for their role in rigging London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, including former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes. They remain the only bankers jailed since the 2008 financial crisis – and they’re innocent of the crimes of which they are accused.

A widespread attempt at state level to manipulate Libor might also be relevant to a jury’s assessment of whether the accused was acting dishonestly – a key ingredient of fraud offences. 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 BBC's Panorama, Newsnight and BBC Radio 4's investigative strand, File on Four.