Rogue trader is back at work

                                                                                         

There’s good news of sorts for Jérôme Kerviel, the junior trader who lost France’s second biggest bank, Sociéte Générale, a pile of money back at the end of January. He has found himself a new job.

But the twist in the tale that's difficult to believe is that he has been hired by a software company, Lemaire Consultants and Associates (LCA), that as part of its total package of services, also deals with offering its customers risk and crisis management coaching.

Now some might think it a little odd that Kerviel should be offered a job in a firm specialising in areas not a million miles removed from those that allowed him to commit such a massive fraud in the first place.

After all the 31-year-old managed to lose a cool €5 billion of Société Générale’s money by placing bets on what direction the stock market would take. On that evidence alone he is neither a particularly good assessor of risk nor much of an expert on crisis management.

He might however turn out to be a master of fraud if the claims of his former bosses are to be believed. When they discovered that Kerviel had committed more than €50 billion of the bank’s money in purchases, they quickly cut their losses and sold massively incurring that €5 billion deficit.

It’s also slightly strange that that the courts have agreed to let him work for the software company.

He was released from police detention at the end of March, but had a number of restrictions placed upon him. Those include not being allowed to enter a trading room or engage in any activity related to the financial markets.

He also cannot leave Paris and its suburbs without permission and has had to surrender his identity card and passport.

While Kerviel’s new employer has refused to comment on exactly what his new job involves, and he’s only on a probationary period, it takes a fair stretch of the imagination to believe that he’s the company’s new tea boy.

Temporarily at least Kerviel seems to have landed on his feet thanks largely to the generosity of Jean-Raymond Lemaire, the owner of LCA.

Lemaire is the very same man who let kept Kerviel away from the prying lenses of the world’s media by letting him stay at his home just after the trading scandal broke. He has also advised Kerviel on his legal defence in the Société Générale case.

Clearly every rogue trader deserves a guardian angel.

About the author:
Johnny Summerton is a Paris-based broadcaster, writer and journalist specialising in politics and sport. For more on what's making the headlines here in France, log on to his website http://www.persiflagefrance.com

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