'Rogue Trader' Identified, But Still on Loose

'Malicious' 31-year-old massively defrauded SocGen, did not benefit

By Sam Gale Rosen, Newser Staff

Posted Jan 24, 2008 2:46 PM CST

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'Rogue Trader' Identified, But Still on Loose — French bank Societe Generale CEO Daniel Bouton reacts during a press conference at the bank headquarters, Thursday Jan. 24, 2008 outside Paris. Societe Generale said it has uncovered a euro 4.9 billion (US$7.14 billion) fraud - one of history's biggest - by a single futures trader whose scheme of fictitious... (Associated Press)

Jérôme Kerviel, a trader at Société Générale, is the man who lost the French bank $7.2 billion in fraudulent trades, using an "intimate and malicious" knowledge of bank procedure to cover his tracks, the Wall Street Journal reports. The 31-year-old Kerviel got no benefit from the trades, though the huge loss may have helped to spark Monday's worldwide selloff.

Christian Noyer, head of the Bank of France, said today there will be an investigation at Société Générale, and that the bank will "look into whether the internal controls were sufficient." But Noyer denies a failure of oversight on the government's part. "We can't have a controller behind every trader at every bank in the country at every moment," he said. (More France stories.)

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