Word: illicitness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Following their meeting Wednesday, board members said they had rejected Bouton's resignation in order to preserve stability while the bank is still reeling from the $7.13 billion loss resulting from derivative trader Jérome Kerviel's illicit futures speculation. Many cited Bouton's storied record of fiercely defending Société Générale's independence in the past. But even before that day had ended, the general surprise that greeted Bouton's survival gave way to anticipation that he'd been kept aboard as the best-placed expert to chose the best among several...
...excerpts of the interrogation transcript leaked to the daily Le Monde, Kerviel contends his superiors knew of his illicit activity and turned a blind eye to it. "I can't believe my superiors weren't aware of the amounts I was committing, because it's impossible to generate such big profits with small positions," Le Monde cites Kerviel telling investigators. "That led me to believe that as long as I was in the black, my superiors closed their eyes to the methods and volumes involved."That suggests that even more destabilizing revelations for Soci...
...Days before, Société Générale executives had discovered Kerviel's massive illicit operation, after the trader had gambled positions worth about $73 billion. That's actually more than the bank's entire worth by around $25 billion. Instantly, this evoked comparisons in the media with another lone rogue, Nick Leeson, whose fictitious trades in Singapore lost $1.4 billion for Barings Bank in 1995, wiping out the bank's cash reserves. Leeson was arrested after an international manhunt, and spent more than three years in a Singapore jail. By contrast, Soci...
...from purloined art sometimes goes into the coffers of drug and arms dealers, even terrorists. "We have indisputable evidence that criminal networks are involved in art crime," says Vernon Rapley, head of Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Unit. There's no way to measure accurately how much the illicit art trade - which includes stolen art, fakes, forgeries and looted artifacts - is actually worth. But some estimates run as high as $6 billion a year...
...from the composer’s oeuvre. He is caught in the gaze of a framed portrait of his great-grandfather, a diamond prospector. He then sets off for a black township on a genealogical quest for the long-lost cousins he hypothesizes he must have, descendants of the illicit sexual liaisons that often transpired between prospectors and the black washerwoman who worked in the mining camps. A series of hastily strung-together clauses ensues, and the story abruptly terminates in Morris’ existential questioning in a township bar: “These bar-room companions buddies comrades, could...