Australian former Rabobank trader Paul Thompson will spend three months in a Los Angeles prison for his role in a global rate-rigging scandal.
The sentence is the shortest handed out so far by US and British courts in the Libor-rigging crackdown which has convicted seven other men and forced some of the world's biggest banks to pay billions of dollars of fines.
Mr Thompson told a New York court he had been "truly terrified" of what lay ahead of him, particularly after medical tests revealed last week there was an 80 per cent chance he had developed prostate cancer.
The sentence marks a jarring fall from grace for the 50-year-old husband and father of three who grew up in country Western Australia and attended the prestigious Wesley College in South Perth as a boarder before graduating from The University of Western Australia with a commerce degree in 1986.
Mr Thompson worked for Dutch bank Rabobank based in Singapore from 2003 to 2006 and Hong Kong from 2006 to 2011, most recently as its head of liquidity and finance for Asia.
'My stomach churns'
He traded derivative products tied to the US dollar and Japanese yen Libor rates and was accused of entering into a scheme with several other Rabobank employees to influence the benchmark, used to set the rate on trillions of dollars of bonds and loans around the world, to the bank's advantage.
According to a 2014 indictment, Mr Thompson allegedly wrote to a colleague and asked them to "sneak your 3 [month] Libor down a cheeky 1 or 2 [basis points]" because "it will make a bit of diff for me".
Mr Thompson's lawyers argued the "conduct was widespread, condoned and well-known throughout the industry".
"Still to this day, I cannot say why I started making these requests," Mr Thompson said in court on Wednesday.
"However, I wish that I had stood up against this activity and not participated. My stomach churns and I feel sick every time I read back over these emails, some of which I have read dozens of times over the past six years."
Health concerns
Mr Thompson faced up to 30 years' jail time after pleading guilty in July to a charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, but US prosecutors said federal sentencing guidelines called for 33 to 41 months in jail.
The seven other men sentenced as a result of the scandal received between one year and five-and-a-half-year jail terms.
US district court judge Jed Rakoff told the court Mr Thompson's health and the long distance that would separate him from his family in Perth, some of whom have their own health issues, meant a severe jail service was not warranted.
Judge Rakoff, who sentenced two other Rabobank traders to prison in March, has long been a critic of the sentencing guidelines, arguing they result in overly harsh sentences.
Mr Thompson's lawyers had argued he should receive community service or home detention in Perth rather than time in a US prison given his wife had suffered a heart attack, his middle son has a serious illness and he is the primary carer for his mother, who has long battled cancer.
Mr Thompson will return to Perth until beginning his sentence on February 6. Judge Rakoff recommended the sentence be served in a Los Angeles prison with a medical facility.
A spokesman for the Thompson family said they had "expressed gratitude for all the support they have received from their family and many friends during the last year or two that this case has been in the public eye".
With AAP
