Software dev turned rogue trader gets jail and €4.9bn fine

Jerome Kerviel is the fall guy for Société Générale

Seems that Société Générale was happy to pocket the profits when things were going well for Jerome Kerviel, even though his outgoing costs of business were beyond his limits.

When the tides changed all of a sudden the bank took notice of his short-circuiting the few safety measures there were in place.

The hypocrisy is that the bank itself was criticised for it's lack of control - but that is forgotten in the criminal justice system of France.

Lord Hi executioner

Wonder if he'll get a discount of he pays within 30 days.

ermm get it right

"The highly leveraged hedge fund trades"

Without wishing to be.overly picky, his activities had nothing to do with hedge funds. He was laying off the bank's own risk

Oh, How I Laughed

"...manipulating the Excel spreadsheet reports that were providing the bank's management with trading updates..."

Much of 'management' seems to run on Excel spreadsheets that have no configuration control, no audit trail and no security. It's amazing how a well presented chart can affect people's minds.

Utter bollocks

Why does no one ever speak about just how much money Jerome Kerviel made for the SocGen. This was no rogue trader, he started and ended as all the other puppets do, dangling on the end of a string until the string gets cut.

If the last deal he made had made money, instead of losing money, for the SocGen, his name would never have been known.

The high flying wanker bosses above Kerviel have not been held responsable and yet they had, and always have had, the power to control everything that gets done on the trading desks.

Kerviel did not commit a crime, he made bets, OK rather large bets ( read 50Billion € bets) and unfortunately lost on the last one, big fucking deal. Do the SocGen really want to publicly admit that they allow their traders to play with such large sums, of course they dont, so instead they make up a 2 bit story and find a scapegoat.

If Kerviel had really been some crack, wizard, hotshot, rogue trader he would have set up offshore accounts and whittled away small sums of money that no one would ever have noticed. Fuck he had the capacity to play with 50Bn €, can you imagine that even 0.0001% = 50K. One ten thousandths of a percentage.

Today the upper echelons within the banking systems are firmly in the belief that they are way above and much stronger than the law and capable of redeeming themselves regardless of their crimes. ( No , I am not talking about people at Kerviel level).

Society today no longer punishes those in responsabilty, we fucking reward them with bigger bonuses.

I just hope that Kerviel managed to back up some gritty details pertaining to his ex-bosses and will one day publish them. ( But I doubt that he was that clever).

One day the IT industry grunts, thats you and me folks, will be blamed and responsable for all government / financial institution / [ enter large coprprate entity here] errors due the fact that we have access to the information and therefore probably manipulated it.

Run, hide , change your name/ identity, swap your wife for a Gorrilla named george and camp out in the depths of the deepest jungles. They know you did it, they have the proof, after all you were an IT guy ( read puppet).

I am out of breath now, mines the one with the oxygen tank

PS I feel sorry for Kerviel (Now if he would only pass me the Remote login access codes, what jail is he going to anyway )

"excel spreadsheets"

LOL.

Meanwhile...

... Societe General have been *completely exonerated* by the Court who judged them to be totally blameless in this matter despite what appear to be blatantly inadequate security precautions and a lack of monitoring systems which should have prevented this sort of thing from happening in the first place.

Trading figurers reported by *excel* spreadsheet

Share trading systems *should* be able to spew this information out to management staff in *whatever* level of detail they want it on whatever frequency they want it.

I guess either mangers with ADHD or unable to RTM.

But the icon says it all. People thought Nick Leeson got away with his fail for so long because of the Englishman's word is his bond routine (IIRC that was 1987).

Icon says it all really.

I don't think the fine is meaningless, as such

I may be wrong, but I suspect that SG will be able to put the 5 billion euros on their balance sheet as money owing, then write it off as a bad debt, giving them a massive tax write-off.

Until I had that thought, I was thinking that it just showed that Judges do have a sense of humour, but now I'm thinking the Judge was handed a bulging brown envelope to encourage him to levy the fine.

Just a thought, like, and I could be very wrong about how the French tax system works.

GJC

*Yawn

Some numbers on a bunch of computer screens changed. The world did not come to an end.

Why aren't people more honest in describing the money markets as little more or less than a numbers video game. Far too much reality is being assigned to something that is entirely abstract and empty.

Rogue Trading ?

Do you seriously expect us to believe senior management weren't aware of his activities. Isn't it normal for traders to engage in such risky investments and management turn a blind eye, as long as they make money.

eh

You have to ask what the managers, auditors, compliance teams etc where doing.

"fictitious accounts" still need to have money in them, it has to come from somewhere and those same accounts will be seen by the back office team as a whole, along with mangers and others.

So the banks gets a fine it wont enforce which it can write off as a loss (hidden state subsidy) springs to mind, the alleged Perp has a job and probably a nice cushion not to speak out and his appeal will see his sentence reduced to a suspended one is my prediction.

Bank protected, scape goat produced, back to the bonus treadmill

Paris, well its obvious really

Terrible Blow to British Prestige

Britain is the master of the establishment whitewash (there's a good one going on at the moment).

But this French court is making our cover-ups look thoroughly second-rate. I salute them, but I regret our lost pre-eminence.