Madoff, Raju, Ponzi & Co.
ROGUES GALLERY
By Stanley Pignal
In retrospect, it did seem odd that Jérôme Kerviel hadn’t taken any holiday for a couple of years. But so what? The young trader was an affable colleague, diligent to the point of staying late and always courteous to the back-office staff. Being away from work forced him to confront the death of his father, he said. That’s why he came in at weekends, too. He had few friends. He wanted to do well. And so it was that a 31-year-old with a penchant for computing was given the time and freedom to gamble up to €50bn on the stock market. A few more weeks and Société Générale, his employer, might have gone bust.
The risk of an employee going rogue has existed ever since the owners of capital entrusted others with their money, either to safeguard or invest it. The most likely rogue, inevitably, is the one who absconds with funds before the investor realises there is no South Sea plantation, no patented miracle cure. But even more complicated swindles are nothing new.
John Kenneth Galbraith, whose treatise The Great Crash, 1929, is enjoying a depression-era revival, mused that embezzlement in banks and businesses was far more common than suspected. “At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars,” he wrote. In good times, Galbraith said, when people are more relaxed and money is plentiful, the bezzle grows. In a depression, it shrinks. As a financial system disintegrates, the capital cushions that mask the bezzle vanish. Or, in the words of Warren Buffett: “It’s only when the tide goes out, you find out who’s swimming naked.”
High finance – and the trading of money, more particularly – has kicked up the most eye-catching cases of fraud from low-level employees, from which our rogues gallery is drawn. There was a Kerviel moment as early as 1860, when William Pullinger, chief cashier at the Union Bank in London, admitted to having helped himself to £263,000 of his employer’s deposits at the Bank of England, which he used over five years to gamble on the stock exchange.
What about rogue traders who make money? Are they identified as astute risk-takers and promoted? About a dozen rogues are reckoned to have lost their banks more than $100m, yet no bank has evercorded a gain on that scale from unauthorised trading. Step forward, the unknown rogue trader.
Jérôme Kerviel
The business and political world’s aristocracy were gathered in Davos a year ago when Société Générale told investors it had been the victim of a “financial terrorist”. France’s second-biggest bank detailed how an employee on a lowly trading desk had taken unauthorised positions totalling €50bn – or twice the bank’s capital. The unwinding of the bets eventually left a shortfall of €4.9bn, enough for some to wonder whether the bank would be able to remain independent.
Kerviel had deftly navigated weak internal controls to take on ever-larger positions. Small-scale fraud ballooned until titanic sums were put on the line. But, unlike other rogues, Kerviel had no personal stake in the fraud, no bezzle to cover. His early illegal trades were hugely successful; at one point the trader had €€1.4bn of rogue gains. His attempts to reduce his winnings overshot.
Kerviel’s defence, so far, is that his bosses knew exactly what he was up to. “The aim was to win money for the bank,” he said in his only public statement to date. “One loses the notion of scale when one works in this field . . . It’s easy to get carried away.”
The French public, at least, are on Kerviel’s side. Only one in seven blamed him for the loss at the time; most held either the bank’s management or the regulator responsible. However, justice is likely to be less kind; a prison sentence looks inevitable. Meanwhile, he is working for a small IT consultancy between pre-trial hearings.
Nick Leeson
If market outsiders didn’t understand just what brought about the collapse of Barings Bank in September 1995, they could at least believe they understood the main protagonist. Nick Leeson seemed to epitomise a generation of brash young traders who thought nothing of lighting celebratory cigars using high denomination banknotes. Whereas finance had once been the preserve of pin-striped, bowler-hatted Oxford graduates, Leeson, aged 28 at the time, hailed from Watford, had never been to university and wore baseball caps.
It was people like Leeson who had helped the City of London thrive since Margaret Thatcher’s go-go 1980s. “It is not actually very difficult to make money in the securities business,” Peter Baring, chairman of the bank, famously remarked at the time. Indeed, very little of Leeson’s profit was “bezzle” in the early days. Based in Singapore, his remit was to scoop up pennies by buying securities in one market and simultaneously selling the same securities in another one where the price was slightly higher. The strategy was low-risk but reportedly accounted for 10 per cent of the bank’s annual profits in the early 1990s.
A few small mistakes had pushed Leeson to open an error account, which he soon discovered was not monitored by the bank. He hoped that a few modest losses parked there could be reversed in better times.
Meanwhile, his experience in the back office, where compliance is monitored, helped him fend off questions from the bank’s distant headquarters. A £2m shortfall at the end of 1992 grew to £23m in 1993 and to £208m a year later as Leeson applied ever riskier strategies to try to rectify the situation.
By February 1995, when Leeson fled to Kuala L umpur, the bezzle had reached £827m. Barings – which had traded on its conservative reputation since being bailed out by the Bank of England after an 1890s South American sovereign debt scheme went awry – in effect went bust, selling itself for £1 to ING, the Dutch insurer.
Leeson spent four years in prison in Singapore, his sentence cut short by colon cancer. The first rogue to be imprisoned, he was also the first to be rehabilitated. His biography became a bestseller, spawning a movie.
Leeson now lives in Galway, Ireland, where he manages the affairs of the local football club. He supplements his income on the after-dinner-speaking circuit.
Toshihide Iguchi
The financial world was still digesting the “one-off” trading accident at Barings when Toshihide Iguchi sent a 30-page letter to his boss at Daiwa Bank on July 13 1995. The contents explained how the Japanese bank’s star bond trader had carried out a series of frauds far more elaborate and longer-lasting than Nick Leeson’s. Whereas Leeson had improvised his fraud, resorting to a hidden account only on occasion to save his trading independence, Iguchi admitted to having forged 30,000 trading slips over 11 years of dealing in government bonds in New York.
In other respects, the similarities with Leeson were startling. Iguchi had also risen from the unglamorous back office. His knowledge of compliance procedures gave him the opportunity to hide away what seemed at first to be modest one-off losses.
With his legitimate trading activities generating half the New York outpost’s total profits, few thought of challenging Iguchi. “To me it was only a violation of internal rules,” he later said from prison. “I didn’t set out to rob a bank.” The fraud was simple: whenever his trades lost money, Iguchi sold bonds from Daiwa’s own accounts or those of its customers, and then forged slips to make the transactions look legitimate.
Iguchi’s fraud had started in 1984 and had survived rapid changes in how trades were processed and how trading money was accounted for. Like other rogues, he shunned holidays, worried that the elaborate fraud would be discovered in his absence.
He later pleaded guilty to misapplication of bank funds, false bookkeeping and money laundering, and was sentenced in New York to four years in prison and a $2.6m fine. He opted to serve much of it in solitary confinement. Daiwa exited the US market shortly afterwards, having been reprimanded for its actions after it uncovered the loss.
Iguchi eventually returned to his native Japan, where his memoir became a bestseller. He was last heard of running an English language school in Kobe.
Yasuo Hamanaka
Before their frauds, Leeson and Iguchi were unknown beyond immediate colleagues and competitors. Not so Yasuo Hamanaka, or “Mr 5 Per Cent”, a reference to the slice of the global copper market he was said to
control while trading for Sumitomo Corporation, one of Japanese finance’s most august names.
Market participants and regulators protested that the quantities of copper Hamanaka was buying was creating an artificial shortage and correspondingly high prices. Using an opaque network focused on
London, he would release limited amounts of the metal, making huge profits at the expense of those buying for legitimate reasons. The strategy caused vast sums to be invested in mining copper, where no
real demand existed.
Moving such deep commodity markets is expensive, and the strategy kicks up necessary losses to protect an overall lucrative position. Struggling to explain those losses, Hamanaka instead opted to hide
them, hoping higher commodity prices would bail him out. Despite his manipulation, they did not. Hamanaka’s losses came to $2.6bn: more than Leeson and Iguchi combined.
When the fraud unwound after a decade in 1996, it caused the copper price to tumble, the first clear evidence of markets moving as result of fraud until SocGen was forced to dump Kerviel’s positions a decade
later.
Beyond Sumitomo, the losses prompted a bout of soul-searching at the heart of Japanese capitalism as it tried to muddle through its “lost decade”. Hamanaka spent eight years in prison, still the longest
conviction of any rogue trader. It wasn’t long after his release in 2005 that he joked about getting back into the copper game.
John Rusnak
By 2002, rogue trading appeared to have been eradicated. Lessons had been learned, banks assured; investment in compliance experts meant institutions could keep up with their traders’ strategies.
No new rogues had appeared since Hamanaka, despite the strains of the Asian crisis and Russian debt default in the late 1990s. Capitalism’s problem now seemed to be in the business world, where massive
accounting frauds at WorldCom and Enron were being unearthed.
John Rusnak’s fraud, unveiled in February 2002, was not the most elaborate, nor was it the boldest. The $700m of losses incurred by Allied Irish Bank’s US subsidiary paled in comparison to earlier scandals but its very banality implied that rogue trading was not confined to the most complex parts of the financial system.
Rusnak was more Joe Average than Master of the Universe. Peers described him as a solid performer, a plodding foreign-exchange trader on a modest $85,000 salary, a churchgoer with two kids and a mortgage.
Based in unglamorous Maryland, Rusnak was far removed from the pinnacles of global finance. Whereas only dozens of Leesons or Iguchis existed, there were thousands of Rusnaks across the world who specialised in seemingly low-risk trading for their banks.
Leeson, Iguchi and Hamanaka had exploited weaknesses in compliance systems, but they could only do so because of the considerable clout their trading profits earned them. The first two had even helped design the back-office systems meant to control them. Rusnak, by contrast, was unmasked by a routine check. Like other rogue traders, he had tried to conceal small losses. He found that he got away with the deception; it seemed plausible that a big payday could eradicate the bezzle in time. But by 2002, he was reportedly betting up to $7.5bn on currency movements, 3,000 times his $2.5m trading limit.
Rusnak is due to be released next year after serving seven and a half years in prison. In that time, several instances of similar-sized rogue incidents have come to light, as more banks piled into trading with limited understanding of how to stop their employees taking unauthorised positions.