The senior Westpac rates trader at the centre of misconduct allegations in the bank bills market told the Federal Court yesterday that he was "probably not all that interested anyway," in much of the years-old banter being relied on by ASIC to build its case. Colin Roden, director of portfolio management in group treasury at Westpac, took a turn yesterday as witness on the sixteenth day of a trial. He spent most of the day refuting the basis of many of the questions put to him by ASIC's counsel, Phillip Crutchfield.Roden conceded only one instance of discussing alleged manipulation of rates, relating to his own concerns nearly a decade ago that UBS was doing so.He played even this notion down, putting his spin on one of many forgotten - though recorded - conversations."I think market participants quite often speculate about what other people are doing. The reality is, no one really knows what anyone else is doing, or the reasons for why they're doing things," Roden told Justice Jonathan Beach at a hearing in Melbourne.Roden professed disdain at a stream of questions from Crutchfield intended to extract concessions that Westpac's main rates trader breached Chinese walls via familiar and frequent chats with a key trader from the bank's financial markets division."Physical access required passes for people to enter into the Treasury area, and Financial Markets people had no access to go into Treasury," Roden explained."I think it was well understood within Treasury that Westpac Financial Markets was just another supplier of services to us, and that we were an independent operation," he said.Pushed to consider a series of exchanges with a Mr Parker from Financial Markets, Roden said "that doesn't mean you can provide information in a colour sense, it's not detail …. [the] context [maybe] it's just a general comment that most people in the market would be aware of."Roden kept with the metaphor amid a debate with Crutchfield over conversations he'd had with Parker from mid-2008."Colour is a market expression that says, 'is there a reason why it might have gone up or it might have gone down or it went sideways', that sort of information," he said.In this instance, Roden pointed out, "given this is in June 2008, it's possibly in a period where financial markets were in meltdown, and it may be not too far away from the demise of Lehman Brothers. There are other things happening and it's quite possible at this time. There was a period where BBSW was extraordinarily volatile."This is in June 2008 … and people were just trying to find out why is it so volatile and people would be having those form of discussions."Asked about a later exchange with Parker, Roden said that was "a pretty pointless question."  "It's quite clear I have got no real interest in providing any information to Mr Parker and I'm just, like, trying to bat him away without being rude. "With the benefit of hindsight, maybe I should have just told him stop harassing