Jérôme Kerviel

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Jérôme Kerviel (2015)

Jerome Kerviel [ ʒeʁom kɛʁvjɛl ] (* 11. January 1977 in Pont-l'Abbé , Finistère department , France ) is a former employee of the French bank Societe Generale , which in January 2008 as traders in proprietary trading high losses caused.

Life

Kerviel completed his master's degree in financial markets ( French master en finance de marché ) at the University of Lyon II . In August 2000 he started working at Société Générale in the Corporate & Investment Banking (SG CIB) division. Since 2005, Kerviel worked in the Arbitrage group of Société Générale.

Causing the crisis at Société Générale

According to international press reports from January 2008, he is accused of having caused the bank with speculative transactions a loss of 4.82 billion euros. In total, he is said to have built up trading positions worth 50 billion euros without authorization. The background and responsibilities are still under investigation.

Examining magistrates Renaud van Ryumbecke and Françoise Desset have been investigating Kerviel since the end of January 2008. He was accused of breach of trust, forgery and use of forgeries and breaking into an information system. Until the end of the proceedings, he is legally prohibited from working in the financial sector.

He has been working for a computer company since his release from custody in April 2008.

A report prepared by the auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers on behalf of Société Générale came to the conclusion that - contrary to the bank's original statements - Kerviel was not an individual perpetrator, but was supported in his manipulations by an assistant. Supervisors could not be found to be complicit in this investigation. However, they are accused of failing to monitor Kerviel's trading activity.

Since June 8, 2010, however, Kerviel had to answer in court: Société Générale was only warned and had to pay a fine of four million euros. The accusation against Kerviel, however, was that he had carried out unauthorized speculations in the billions and had unauthorized intrusions into computer systems. He was also accused of forgery. In the event of a conviction, Kerviel could face a maximum prison sentence of five years, a fine of 375,500 euros. Major criminal charges are breach of trust and forgery of documents . Before the trial began, Kerviel revealed details in a book.

On October 5, 2010, he was by a French court in Paris in the first instance to five years in prison, two of them suspended on probation because of embezzlement sentenced, forgery and fraudulent manipulation. The judges saw it as proven that Kerviel carried out the speculation on his own initiative and so it came to the billions in losses. He was also sentenced to repayment of 4.9 billion euros to his former employer, Société Générale. On October 24, 2012, a French court of appeal upheld the judgment against Jérôme Kerviel. In the final instance, in March 2014, the French highest court upheld the criminal conviction. The sentence to pay damages has been overturned and must therefore be negotiated again. Kerviel was in Italy and went on a two-month pilgrimage from Rome to the French border. On Sunday, May 18, 2014, he announced at the border that he would not serve his sentence, but crossed the border on the following Monday to be arrested. His migration generated considerable media attention in France and led to increasing solidarity with Kerviel.

On September 8, 2014, Kerviel was released on parole after a total of five months in prison. For the rest of his imprisonment he has to wear an electronic ankle cuff and is bound by conditions with regard to his area of ​​activity.

A Paris labor court awarded Kerviel compensation of 450,000 euros on June 7, 2016, because Société Générale's dismissal was unlawful. The bank's lawyer announced an appeal.

The Versailles Court of Appeal ruled on September 23, 2016 that Kerviel was only partially responsible for the damage to the bank. Control mechanisms have failed. According to the ruling, Kerviel only has to pay back one million euros to Société Générale instead of the previously set 4.9 billion euros.

Social reactions in France, comics, film

In a survey in February 2008, 77 percent of the French saw Kerviel as a victim rather than a perpetrator. For many French people, Kerviel is an antihero who managed to fool the elitist bankers of the Société Generale. In the publishing house Thomas Jeunesse by Francois-Xavier Thomas, Lorentz and Nicolas Million published the comic The Diary of Jérôme Kerviel , a mixture of reality and fiction, which is less about a criticism of Kerviel, but of the financial system. The publisher of the comic book publisher said that for personal reasons he was not on the best of terms with the banks: "They all refused to give us a loan in the start-up phase, including Société Générale." They were not ready to take a risk. Ironically, the Kerviel scandal shows that the same banks have put significant capital at risk in daring financial transactions.

His story was filmed in the thriller L'Outsider by Christophe Barratier , which appeared in the summer of 2016.

See also

Fonts

  • Jérôme Kerviel: L'engrenage - Mémoires d'un trader , Verlag Flammarion, Paris 2010 ISBN 978-2-08-123886-2 (German title: Just a wheel in the gear: Memoiren eines Traders, FinanzBuch Verlag, Munich 2010 ISBN 978- 3-89879-618-7 )

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rüdiger Jungbluth: Jérôme almighty . In: The time . No. 06/2008 , January 31, 2008 ( zeit.de ).
  2. ↑ Reuters, Bloomberg: Animation, in the Financial Times Deutschland of September 25, 2008, page 32
  3. ↑ http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/25/business/socgen.php
  4. ↑ Kerviel's superior is complicit: Article from ftd.de on May 26, 2008 ( Memento from May 30, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Ex-dealer Kerviel comes to court , Manager Magazin online from September 1, 2009.
  6. ↑ Jérôme Kerviel's disclosure book , mirror online from May 2, 2010
  7. ↑ Stock exchange gamer Kerviel to repay billions in: Spiegel Online from October 5, 2010
  8. ↑ The court finds Jerome Kerviel guilty in: Handelsblatt dated October 5, 2010
  9. ↑ Stock exchange trader Kerviel to repay five billion euros Spiegel Online, October 24, 2012
  10. ↑ Final verdict: Stock exchange gambler Kerviel has to go to jail , Spiegel Online from March 19, 2014.
  11. ↑ a b A banker goes to prison ( Memento from May 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Frankfurter Rundschau from May 19, 2014.
  12. ↑ Convicted scandal banker Kerviel arrested . Die Welt from May 19, 2014.
  13. ↑ Rogue trader Jerome Kerviel leaves French jail. BBC News, September 8, 2014, accessed September 8, 2014 .
  14. ↑ 5 billion euros gambled away - that's not enough for a termination. manager magazin , June 7, 2016, accessed June 7, 2016 .
  15. ↑ Stefan Kaiser: Court drastically lowers punishment for scandal banker Kerviel. In: Spiegel Online. September 23, 2016. Retrieved September 23, 2016 .
  16. ↑ Reuters, Bloomberg: Animation, in the Financial Times Deutschland of September 25, 2008, page 32
personal data
SURNAME Kerviel, Jérôme
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French banker
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1977
PLACE OF BIRTH Pont-l'Abbé