Word: leeson
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Enron executives are hardly the first to be accused of messing with other people's money. A rogue trader at Allied Irish Banks landed in trouble last week for allegedly losing $750 million. Not all have seemed as colorful as NICHOLAS LEESON, who brought down Britain's prestigious Barings Bank with $1.4 billion in concealed losses...
...week before he disappeared, Nicholas Leeson kept throwing up in the bathroom at work. Colleagues didn't know why. He had been working hard, perhaps harder than usual... At the end of trading that [last] day, Leeson gathered up his notes,walked off the floor and began his getaway. By 11:30 that night, he was out of Singapore, checking into a hotel in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, 200 miles to the north. At 7 a.m. [the next day], his wife reportedly jumped into a cab and headed for the airport. In his wake lay a venerable...
While Allied Irish was measuring the damage to its bottom line and its reputation, traders everywhere were coming under closer scrutiny from nervous supervisors. Most worrying for banks and their regulators is that Rusnak may have used the exact same method as Leeson: when he began to pile up losses in currency trades, he allegedly hid these by fabricating other deals that, on paper, showed him making profits. Leeson was able to conceal his activities for two years because, like many traders at the time, he was authorized both to make and to settle his deals. In the aftermath...
...this early stage, it's hard to say what will come of John Rusnak. Bruce Lamdin, his co-counsel, said his client had "made himself available to the FBI." If Rusnak's story continues to parallel Leeson's, there could be some jail time, followed by mid-ranking celebrity. There could be biographies, autobiographies and who knows, maybe even Rogue Trader...
...Nick Leeson Barings, Britain?s oldest merchant bank, collapsed in 1995 after the Singapore-based Leeson ran up losses from unauthorized trading of nearly $1.3 billion. He was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in jail in Singapore for fraud but was released in 1999 because he was suffering from cancer...