Word: leesons
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Indeed, Britain's sedate financial sector was deregulated in the 1980s-and suddenly the aggressive Americans and Japanese came crashing in with giant salaries garnished with even more gigantic bonuses for star traders. Young, ambitious people like Leeson were swept up in the scavenger hunt for talent, and Barings was for the first time managing a new kind of moneyspinner. "Traders were made overnight," says Valerie Thompson, who traded securities for Solomon Brothers in London for 15 years and watched the change. "Managers did not have time to train them properly. Leeson picked up a little bit of knowledge...
CHEERS WENT UP IN FUTURES MARKETS everywhere when the news broke of Leeson's detention in Germany last Thursday after his Royal Brunei airliner landed in Frankfurt after a 12-hour flight. Leeson had left Kuala Lumpur to rendezvous with his wife Lisa in the Malaysian resort town of Kota Kinabalu, and there, after plunking down $1,600 in cash for seats in the economy section, he boarded the plane in his own name. Malaysian authorities just missed catching up with the Leesons. But reports of their flight immediately circulated abroad. In Frankfurt, German police, carrying pictures of the couple...
Lisa has been released and is back in Britain. Nick's immediate future is uncertain. Singapore has requested his extradition, and Leeson will no doubt contest any attempt to send him back to Asia. In addition to a German lawyer, Leeson has retained lawyers from Kingsley Napley, Britain's leading firm specializing in white-collar crime. Leeson, said Christopher Murray, his attorney at the firm, simply wanted to return to England "to put the record straight." Leeson's sister Sarah, 18, was emphatic. "One person can't lose all that money," she said. "They are playing on his background, making...
...Singapore gets Leeson, it will most likely charge him with aggravated cheating and deception. It has already charged him with criminal breach of trust and forgery of certificates. Last week Singapore police seized stationery with faked company letterheads and a dummy bank ticket that said $80 million had been deposited into a Barings futures account at Citibank. No such transfer took place, and prosecutors are likely to argue that it gave Leeson a way of proving he was making the huge Nikkei trades on behalf of a client. "Once he is here," says Pala Krishnan, one of Singapore's leading...
...flight of Nicholas Leeson might have provided a juicy plot for Maugham or Le Carra. The young high flier's dizzying speculations on Singapore's International Monetary Exchange roiled international currency markets as well as the Tokyo stock market, and mortally wounded Barings bank, one of Britain's most venerable financial institutions, which was unable to cover losses of more than $1 billion. As the extent of the damage became apparent, Leeson, 28, and his wife Lisa Sims, 23, fled their apartment in Singapore and spent a week on the lam. Detained last Wednesday as he arrived in Frankfurt, Germany...