Word: kerviel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just a week ago, when global markets from Bombay to Wall Street were tanking, few investors had ever heard the name Jér?me Kerviel. Why would they? The 31-year-old from small-town Brittany in France was a low-level futures trader. One week later, Kerviel - the rogue trader who has lost Société Générale $7.1 billion) - now has 347,000 hits on Google, 14 groups dedicated to him on Facebook, and a Wikipedia biography - and the mounting political scandal over how he pulled off the biggest scam in banking history...
...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...
...cannot deny that if we had not been selling the market would have fallen less," he said, though he said he thought its effect had been "minimal." With the markets in turmoil, the dark-haired, slim trader slipped out of sight, surrendering to financial police only on Saturday afternoon. Kerviel remains in custody in Paris but so far faces no criminal charges. The clock is running however: by early afternoon Monday, police must either free him or present Kerviel to a judge for the opening of a full judicial investigation into charges of fraud...
Bank executives said they finally realized their mammoth problem last weekend. Société Générale chief executive of corporate and investment banking Jean-Pierre Mustier told reporters that he was "convinced [Kerviel] acted alone." Kerviel confessed to the elaborate fraud during a six-hour grilling by bank officials on Saturday night, according to the Daily Telegraph, which posted a photograph online of a slender, dark-haired man. Despite the weekend revelations, three days lapsed before executives suspended trading of Société Générale shares. They declined to tell reporters...
...huge scale and complexity of Kerviel's fraud has strong echoes of Nick Leeson, a young rogue British trader in Singapore. Leeson bankrupted the 230-year-old Barings Bank in 1995, after losing $1.38 billion in fictitious trades on Asian futures markets, single-handedly wiping out Barings' cash reserves. Leeson was jailed for more than three years in Singapore, and the scandal became almost synonymous with the power of a lone employee to unravel a large company. At the time, officials at various banks said they were tightening internal security measures in order to avert a similar disaster...