Free Republic

This year marks a decade since Jerome Kerviel was taken into custody accused of perpetrating the biggest financial fraud case in history. As a trader at Societe Generale, Kerviel carried out unauthorised trades to a reported value of €49.9bn. Just five days after the bank released details of Kerviel’s illicit activity, the market had experienced losses of around €5bn. Kerviel was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay back the €5bn that he lost. The months that followed saw blame shift around: some thought it was the work of one greedy trader, others maintained that the company,...

PARIS — Ex-trader Jerome Kerviel was convicted on all counts today in history's biggest rogue trading scandal, sentenced to at least three years in prison and ordered to pay his former employer damages of €4.9 billion ($6.7 billion) — a sum so staggering it drew gasps in the courtroom. The court rejected defense arguments that the 33-year-old trader was a scapegoat for a financial system gone haywire with greed and the pursuit of profit at any cost — a decision sure to take some pressure off the beleaguered banking system overall. By ordering a tough sentence for a lone trader,...

“I don’t know where he is,” said Daniel Bouton, the long-standing chief executive and chairman of Société Générale, when he was asked on Thursday about the whereabouts of Jérôme Kerviel, the trader at the centre of one of the biggest frauds in banking history. But while Mr Kerviel’s movements remained unknown, the sequence of events that led to the extraordinary writedown at SocGen was becoming clearer. The trader joined the bank in 2000 and worked in Paris. The first three years of his career were spent in the bank’s so-called “back office” and “middle office”, where trades are settled...