Nick Leeson

During my visit to Channel Expo last week, as described below, I also spent an hour listening to Nick Leeson, the now infamous rogue trader and destroyer of Barings Bank. Ever since this story surfaced in 1995, I have been fascinated by it. (Not sure quite what it has to do with the IT channel but I was very grateful for the opportunity to listen to him anyway.)

For anyone who has been living in a bubble for the last 13 years, Nick was responsible for the collapse, thanks to false, covert and illegal futures trading that eventually came back to bite him, of London's oldest merchant bank, Barings. Even the Queen banked there. He spent 4.5 years in a Singapore jail, where he was behind bars, often in the not-so-inviting company of opposing Triads, for 23 hours a day. Whilst in jail he developed colon cancer, probably not helped by the added stress of his wife divorcing him. He has subsequently turned his life around, beaten the cancer, re-married and is now living a relatively affluent lifestyle in Galway. He still has an injunction against him for 100 million pounds, which he is paying back "very slowly". There was a film made about the story a few years back starring Ewan McGregor, for which he received 16,000 pounds. He didn't see a penny of that money though, it went directly to his ex-wife.

Nick was incredibly candid, embarrassed and even apologetic about the whole thing, although it still doesn't stop him making money from giving talks about it. That, for me, was the dichotomy. I shouldn't really like him but I did. A lot. Admittedly not the the most engaging speaker in the world, I found him honest (ironically), warm and thoroughly decent.

If ever anyone has re-paid their debt to society, he has. I asked him whether he regarded his escapades as a victimless crime, to which he replied that, in actual fact, there were very few victims. Those that suffered as a result of the collapse were the ones that deserved to, the ones so utterly incompetent that they gave him the freedom to do what he did. Apparently, they all now have similar roles at other banks to the ones they performed so badly back in the 90's. He hopes they have learnt their lesson.

Apparently it could never happen again. Modern-day security and audit procedures would prevent such things as the five 8s account (the account Nick set up to post all his losses to until he could pay them back) and his trades would be much more efficiently monitored.

So how the hell did Jerome Kerviel of Societe Generale manage to rack up losses of 7 billion dollars only a few months ago? Nick Leeson "only" lost 862 million pounds.

And do you want to know the funny thing? Societe Generale tried to headhunt Nick Leeson in 1994.