Tucker’s down on his luck

‘This doesn’t look good, Mr Tucker.’ Andrew Tyrie made this observation towards the end of his Treasury Select Committee’s evidence session with Bank of England Deputy Governor Paul Tucker. He was talking about the minutes of a meeting in 2007 which suggested Tucker was aware of the lowballing of Libor, but he might as well have been summing up the witness’s hopes of taking the reins as the Bank’s next Governor.

Tucker insisted he was not aware that lowballing was taking place, but the minutes themselves said: ‘Several group members thought that Libor fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates through the period of stress.’

John Mann leapt on this, saying the minutes quite clearly referred to ‘people submitting returns below what in fact were the traded rates’. ‘That’s criminal fraud – that’s what that minute refers to,’ he added.

Tucker gave a strange reply to this: ‘We thought it was a malfunctioning market, not a dishonest one.’