That Lieborgate is about to spill over and take down many more banks is well known: as previously reported that the world’s biggest bank Deutsche Bank, has become a rat for the Liebor prosecution having turned sides. The reason: Under the leniency programs of the EU, companies may get total immunity from fines or a reduction of fines which the anti-trust authorities would have otherwise imposed on them if they hand over evidence on anti-competitive agreements or those involved in a concerted practice. However, just like in the case of Barclays (with Diamond), JPM (with Bruno Iksil), UBS (with Kweku) and Goldman (with Fabrice Tourre), there always is a scapegoat. Today we find just who that scapegoat is. From Bloomberg. Regulators are investigating the possible roles of Michael Zrihen at Credit Agricole, Didier Sander at HSBC and Christian Bittar at Deutsche Bank. the person said on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The names of the banks and traders were reported earlier today by the Financial Times.

Of course, as so very often happens, the link between the investigated firm, and the person in question no longer exists — after all what better brute way to tie up loose ends, than to fire the person in question at some point in the past: Michael Golden, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, confirmed that Bittar left the bank last year and declined to comment on the investigation . Not surprising. Yet this is where the story gets interesting, and provides a whole new twist on the Lieborgate scandal.

Notice that up until now, the only firms that have been implicated in Lieborgate are, by definition, the BBA member banks which provided daily USD Libor fixings. However, nowhere is it said that this information never exited this close knit cabal of 16 manipulating banks. After all, there are $2 trillion in AUM (a number that is likely $5 trillion when accounting for all the rehypothecated assets at the Prime Brokers) out there run by unregulated hedge funds, and all of these entities would certainly find a way to make a pretty buck on even the tiniest ‘manipulated’, and leveraged Libor arbitrage. And would also pay a pretty penny to get that info. Which brings us back to Bittar. And LinkedIn.

Since neither Bloomberg, nor the earlier FT article have any discussion of just where Mr. Bittar ended up, knowing quite well there is very likely a full-scale investigation forming into his Libor transgressions. The first place we went to, naturally, was LinkedIn, not because we expected to find his profile there: very few higher echelon bankers actually post their resumes on LinkedIn, but because we were fairly confident that the very useful function of seeing whose other profiles had been looked at in the context of even a fake Bittar, would provide us with clues. Sure enough that’s precisely what happened.

Sure enough, the first entry for the DB trader is the following :