Rogues Gallery: Traders Who Lost Big From Unauthorized Deals
The financial world has a storied history of rogue traders. Here are a few from the recent past.
(Bloomberg) -- Mitsubishi Corp. on Friday said a rogue oil trader at its Singapore unit lost $320 million in unauthorized transactions disguised as legitimate hedges for customers. The company has declined to name the trader, but a person familiar with the matter identified him as Wang Xingchen, also known as Jack Wang.
The financial world has a storied history of rogue traders. Here are a few from the recent past:
Nick Leeson, a former derivatives trader, brought down the U.K.’s oldest merchant bank Barings Plc in 1995 after he ran up over $1 billion in losses through unauthorized trades on Japanese stock futures. He pleaded guilty in Singapore and served about three years in prison.
Yasuo Hamanaka lost about about $2.6 billion in illicit trades while serving as Sumitomo Corp.’s chief copper trader in 1996. He served seven years of an eight-year prison sentence.
Jerome Kerviel lost about $5.6 billion while working as a trader at Societe Generale SA after his managers missed at least 1,071 bogus trades he executed. He was convicted in 2010 and served about five months.
Kweku Adoboli, a London-based trader for Swiss bank UBS Group AG, was convicted of fraud in November 2012 for trades that cost the bank $2.3 billion. He served about half of a seven-year sentence and was released in 2015.
To contact the reporter on this story: Nic Querolo in New York at jquerolo1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Doan at ldoan6@bloomberg.net, Joe Ryan, Patrick McKiernan
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