Mark Johnson is facing up to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of nine counts of fraud
A top banker at HSBC has been found guilty of rigging a £2.7billion currency deal to boost the lender’s profits.
Mark Johnson greeted the news he had managed to scam an oil firm, netting £5.5million, with the words ‘ohhh f****** Christmas’.
Found guilty of fraud in New York last night, Johnson is the first financier to be tried in America for tampering with currency markets.
The 51-year-old Briton, who faces up to 20 years in prison after being found guilty on nine counts, is also one of the most senior figures in banking to have been found guilty of fraud.
He was head of HSBC’s global foreign exchange cash trading desk – a post he still held when arrested as he was about to board a flight to London at JFK airport in July last year. The US is seeking to extradite another British banker, Stuart Scott, in the case.
Mr Johnson, a father of six from the New Forest in Hampshire, studied at King’s College London, later taking up a post at Deutsche Bank before being hired by HSBC in 2010.
The court heard the bank was hired by Cairn Energy in 2011 to convert $3.5billion (£2.7billion) into pounds as part of the sale of a subsidiary in India.
Prosecutors said Johnson and fellow executive Mr Scott devised a scheme to drive up the price of pounds by executing a series of trades before carrying out the deal for Cairn. This profit-boosting practice is known as ‘front running’.
Mark Johnson pictured with his attorney after the banker posted bail in New York following his arrest at JFK
Johnson and Mr Scott, who is in Britain and fighting extradition to the US, told Cairn that a spike in the price of pounds had been caused by a ‘Russian buyer’, the court heard. Prosecutors said this was a lie.
Acting assistant attorney general Kenneth Blanco, of the US Justice Department, said: ‘The defendant corruptly manipulated the foreign exchange market for the benefit of the bank and his bonus pool, to the detriment of the bank’s client.’
Johnson’s lawyer John Wing told reporters after the case: ‘They’ve convicted an innocent man.’
During the hearing at a Brooklyn federal courtroom, he told jurors that it was impossible to carry out a massive currency transaction such as the Cairn one without affecting price.
Johnson was found not guilty of one offence. Mr Wing added that the banker, who left HSBC earlier this year, and his colleagues had sought to get a fair price for their client, even giving Cairn a rebate.
Mr Scott left the bank in 2014. Prosecutors said Johnson tipped off colleagues about his scam through code phrases such as ‘my watch is off’.
HSBC declined to comment.
The bank has faced repeated fines for misbehaviour including a £1.2billion penalty in 2012 for money laundering on behalf of Mexican drug cartels.