Bob Diamond Before Treasury Committee To Discuss Libor-Fixing Scandal (LIVE UPDATES)

LIVE: Bob Diamond Faces Questions From MPs On Libor-Gate

Bob Diamond has faced an afternoon of evidence before the Commons Treasury Committee over attempts by Barclays Capital to fix the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, in the three years leading up to 2009.

Diamond, who resigned as Barclays CEO on Tuesday morning, still faced a string of questions about how much he knew about attempts within his firm to fix the Libor rate. It is not clear whether staff at Barclays were successful in doing this, but if they had succeeded it could have affected millions of customers getting mortgages and other loans.

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Among the key points:

  • Barclays was worried that the Labour government was going to try to nationalise them, because the banks' interest rates seemed alarmingly high.
  • Barclays was keen to impress on the government that it was raising its own recapitalisation fund after the crisis through Middle East financing.
  • Diamond claims that conversations with Whitehall - suggested in the written submission on Tuesday - were with "officials", not ministers.
  • Diamond claims he only found out the exact nature of the Libor-rigging attempts "this month" during the course of the investigation.
  • He says he only found out the full extent of the rigging attempts the weekend before it was made public - so about ten or eleven days ago. He claims he felt "physically sick" while downloading the data.
  • He says he is "sorry" for the "reprehensible" actions of the traders who tried to rig Libor. This happened in three separate periods between 2005 and 2009.

On Tuesday Barclays issued a memo which suggested that officials at the Bank of England were aware of attempts to fix Libor, the suggestion being that it had been given a "nod and a wink". It has also been suggested that people in Whitehall had discussions about it. Some people suggested Baroness Vadera, a former Labour treasury minister, discussed the rigging of Libor with the Bank of England. On Wednesday lunchtime Vadera strongly denied this.

Huffpost is watching the proceedings from Westminster and will bring you live updates and all the reaction to Diamond's evidence this afternoon from this page.

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