Jerome Kerviel Says SocGen Superiors ‘Helped’ Him Make Disputed Trades

May 26 (Bloomberg) -- Jerome Kerviel, who goes on trial next month over his role in Societe Generale SA’s 4.9 billion- euro ($6 billion) trading loss, said his superiors “helped” him make the futures bets at the center of the case.

“I’m innocent,” Kerviel, 33, said in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday outside his lawyer’s Paris office. “I want to prove to everybody that my superiors knew what I was doing and helped me to do it, to make more money for the bank.”

Societe Generale, France’s second-largest bank by market value, disclosed the loss in January 2008, saying it occurred after unwinding unauthorized positions taken by a lone employee. While Kerviel has previously said the bank knew about the trades, he now explicitly says his supervisors helped him.

“The more money you get for the bank,” Kerviel said in the interview two weeks before the trial is scheduled to start in Paris. “The more the bank asks you for. My only objective was to make money for the bank.”

Kerviel is charged with abuse of trust, falsifying documents and hacking into bank computers. He faces as many as five years in prison if found guilty at the trial that starts June 8.

Waiting for Kerviel

Jean Veil, a lawyer for Societe Generale, said in a telephone interview that he is “waiting for Mr. Kerviel to prove” that his superiors aided him in his bets.

Paris-based Societe Generale will ask the court to make Kerviel pay it 4.9 billion euros as “reparation for the financial cost of unwinding the fraudulent operations, as well as the cost of the recapitalization,” Veil said.

The June trial will bring the banking sector and the trading culture under the judges’ scrutiny, as well as the question of his own guilt, Kerviel said.

“My first goal is to defend myself and to prove” that the bank hierarchy knew of his activities, said Kerviel, wearing blue jeans, a black v-necked shirt, and gray pinstriped jacket on a sunny day with temperatures of 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius). “I hope perhaps one of the upsides of the trial will be to expose the practices” of traders.

Kerviel worked on Societe Generale’s Delta One trading desk, specializing in European stock market index futures. His job was to arbitrage small price differences between contracts, not to take bets on the markets’ direction. His positions, mostly on Germany’s DAX Index and the pan-European Euro Stoxx 50, had losses of 1.4 billion euros when Societe Generale discovered the fraud. The bank said it lost an additional 3.5 billion euros liquidating the stakes as European markets fell.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aL1HPGZr_TyY&pos=11

Kerviel, you lousy lyer. 30 years in prison is not enough for you !

 

As long as a firm keeps getting bailed out by their governments, I doubt they'd be using any "risk controls"

 

I would love to see him sentenced to pay some enormous amount to socgen, because that's all he deserves, more than prison. Perhaps not 4.9 B but 100 mil would be fair.

Then he would have to do a lot of interviews and write a lot of books like he does right now to offset that.

 

They are not going to find anything tangible on his superiors. All Risk managers do this. They put one thing in email that shows they are trying to control risk and they say another thing on the trading floor. that gives them plausible deniability. Sorry, Kerviel you are the patsy and you are the one that is going to be screwed in prison, literally and figurativly.