Word: leesons
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...jetting off to Indonesia to help set up an office or to Tokyo as part of a team investigating allegations of internal fraud. At the time the Singapore International Monetary Exchange was trying to set itself up as Asia's hot new trading floors. Barings wanted a presence-and Leeson was put on the team assigned to help get it. At first he did settlements as he had done in London. Then, because Barings was short staffed, Leeson began executing trades himself. He was only 25, but as a former colleague puts what must have been the bank's position...
Before long Leeson was bringing in tens of millions of dollars. Last year, when the Asian markets were sagging, he was thought to have made $20 million to $36 million for Barings. Just a couple of weeks before the bank's collapse, he boasted to friends that he had been promised a $2 million bonus for the work, in addition to his $350,000 salary, company-financed apartment and limitless travel budget. In Singapore he developed a following. Says one trader: "When all the charts said sell, he would push the market even higher and the locals would go with...
...hours a day. He wanted to make something of himself because he knew he could." The press, she added, "seem to be saying that if you are working class, you don't deserve a top job, that you should work as a dustman or a shop assistant." Leeson never attended college. At 18 he became a junior clerk at Coutts & Co., another prestigious bank. In 1987 he became a clerk at Morgan Stanley. That American corporate pedigree, a mark of aggressiveness, was enough to help him land a job at Barings...
...their ambitions, Leeson and his wife Lisa never really seemed to fit into the affluent, neo-colonial life-style of Singapore-nor into the city's multiethnic society. Barings paid Leeson's dues for the Cricket Club, an old establishment institution for British expatriates in Singapore, but he rarely went there. The Leesons' three-bedroom apartment was part of a low-rise building on neatly manicured grounds in one of Singapore's fashionable neighborhoods, where Tamil and Malay workers come in every morning to mow the lawns, wash the cars and sweep the grounds. But the Leesons took their apartment...
...Though Leeson was center of attraction on the trading floor, he was, for the most part, a loner. Last week some of his associates expressed surprise that he was married. Said one: "His behavior was more like that of a bachelor." Almost no one had heard of Lisa Leeson in the expatriate community; she was not a member of any of the social clubs. The live-in maid next door says Lisa rarely left the house. When she did, she wore jeans and T shirts or athletic sweats--and according to the apartment building's security guard, "her face looked...