Rogue trader....Whats he done that's illegal?

[Loosehead]

As far as I can tell this guy's has done nothing illegal. Ok he broke his own companies internal rules and overrode their internal systems but as far as the law is concerned he's a bank employee, incompentant certainly. I confess I haven't read all the bumph on this so please enlighten me, learned ABers...

[4GS]

nowt, he's been released without charge:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles /news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=510610&in_p age_id=1811

[Gromit]

Broke a few internal company rules which his employers may have known about anyway.

"Mr Kerviel claimed his strategy had been hugely successful, that he was almost �1 billion in profit in December and that he had been rewarded by the bank with a guarantee of a �200,000 bonus for 2007.

Mr Kerviel claims SocGen then brought the disastrous situation on itself by hastily selling his positions last week.

Several shareholders also filed a complaint with the French financial markets watchdog yesterday after it transpired that a member of SocGen's board sold shares worth �86 million on Jan 9 - shortly before the scandal broke."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml;js essionid=EBOLAAIYIUO0RQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml= /money/2008/01/29/bcnkerviel129.xml

[jno]

the third letter here is particularly relevant

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/df215de2-ce0d-11dc-9 e4e-000077b07658.html

I think the police wanted to be certain he hadn't done anything that amounted to defrauding his employers; presumably they now are. I'm not so sure: if you're employed on the counter this doesn't give you authority to help yourself to money from the cash register. Kerviel was hired to make small trades; he made big ones and in the wrong manner (no countertrades). That sounds to me like the same sort of thing: going beyond his authority in a way that robbed his employers.

[Twenty20]

Yes, but didnt it just come down to company procedures? I couldnt understand why it was being called fraud. Ok, he exceeded the limit that he should have been trading but its not as if the money was heading into his bank account.

[jno]

Twenty20, to defraud someone, there's no requirement that the money go into your own pockets. In effect, in this case, it went off into the pockets of other banks and financial institutions. But if it should have been in the pockets of SocGen then they can say they've been defrauded. Presumably the police now feel this didn't happen, but as I said I'm not entirely convinced. I gather the people of France are hailing him as a rebel against Anglo-Saxon models of capitalism. Considering he's ultimately transferred a lot of money from a French bank to institutions around the world, I wonder if this is a very sensible way of reading it.