If you thought the 2010 trial of the Société Générale rogue trader which ended with a 5-year jail sentence and compensatory damages of eur 4.9 bn was a parody of justice, reading the Kerviel interview in this month's issue of French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, will only reinforce that opinion.
Interviewed by investigative reporter Denis Robert (also author of several books investigating Clearstream) Kerviel makes devastating allegations about his supervisors at SG - where everybody knew him as "Jérôme", the guy who traded huge size -, and lashes out at the media (which spread rumours he had islamist ties because of a Quran copy found at his home)and above all at the justice system which conveniently discarded potential evidences that his supervisors were not completely in the dark about his "extravagant"(sic) trading. Kerviel has been described as a "computer expert" who was able to hide his tracks at the bank, yet he had no training or background in the field. Kerviel joined the equity desk at SG in Paris after an early career in middle office. Soon, the unlikely star trader who had no experience of markets and earned a 5 digit salary was mentored by a colleague to arbitrage cash equities and derivatives. But the arbitrage it seems turned into seat-of-the-pants trading with ever larger positions. At one point, Kerviel pocketed a 1.5 billion gain for the bank. Since his indictment for fraud in 2008, Kerviel who has shared his time between the prison de la santé and friends' places, sometimes sleeping in their garage, has lost all his friends in banking and his wife has left him. A must read.
