Word: accountants
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...profit by making those trades in conjunction with the bank's separate and official holdings of Nikkei 225s in Osaka and SIMEX."I won't tell you how good," says a Barings employee, "but it was a good business." Little did Barings know that it was responsible for error account No. 88888, which was unhedged and would turn out to be fatal to the company...
...late November or December, Leeson decided to wager that the Nikkei index would not drop below about 19,000 points on March 10, 1995. It seemed to be a safe bet: the Japanese economy was already rebounding after a 30-month recession. Using the account No. 88888 also had a special advantage, one that Leeson had probably learned about in his old back-office job in London when he made sure cash flowed into the right accounts. Both Osaka and Singapore demand prompt margin payments on contracts-that is, the difference between what the contracts were sold for and their...
...addition, while Leeson could call up the error account on the company computer, most of his colleagues, who lacked the special password, did not have access to it. And last week members of Leeson's trading team in Singapore admitted to police that he had instructed them to put only a certain number of specific trades in the error account...
...team. On Monday, Feb. 20, Leeson's regional supervisors in Tokyo asked him to reduce the company's holdings of the Nikkei contracts. "It's almost getting to be a problem," a Barings top manager explained to a friend. No one yet suspected the crisis awaiting the company in account No. 88888. By the time internal auditors did suspect, the amount of credit extended to cover those positions had exceeded the bank's capital...
...about the same time, Peter Baring, chairman of the bank, reportedly received a faxed letter from Leeson. According to the Independent, the trader apologized, provided a detailed account of his dealings and said "he doubted the two would ever meet again." When a weekend attempt by the Bank of England to round up a rescuer failed, Baring hinted that a conspiracy had led to the collapse of the institution his family established 232 years ago. But, says Emma Davey, managing editor of Futures and Options World: "Baring didn't have a clue what this is all about. There...