French rogue bank trader Jerome Kerviel was jailed for three years and ordered to pay €4.9 billion damages after being convicted of fraud yesterday.
His lawyer immediately declared he would appeal the Paris court’s verdict. Olivier Metzner said Mr Kerviel was “disgusted” with the verdict and sentence.
He said the court found Mr Kerviel’s employers bank Société Générale “was responsible for nothing, not responsible for the creature that it had created”.
He added: “I have the feeling Jerome Kerviel is paying for an entire system.”
Mr Kerviel, 33, a former futures trader, was found guilty of forgery, breach of trust and unauthorised computer use for covering up bets worth nearly €50 billion between late 2007 and early 2008.
He maintained that the bank accepted his massive risk-taking as long as it made money. The ruling marked a huge victory for Société Générale, one of France’s most established banks, which has worked to clean up its image and put in place tougher risk controls since the scandal broke.
Mr Kerviel stood expressionless as the court convicted him.
The €4.9 billion it ordered him to pay was the amount lost unwinding his complex positions in January 2008 – a punishment he would almost certainly be unable to pay.
While working for the bank, he took home a salary and bonus of less than €100,000 – a relatively modest sum in the financial world.
Mr Kerviel, a soft-spoken and debonair man from western Brittany, has won considerable public appeal in France for his image of being a scapegoat for powerful corporate interests. During the proceedings, both sides admitted to mistakes but Mr Kerviel insisted his bank superiors knew what he was doing. Société Générale’s former chairman acknowledged there were problems in monitoring the trader’s work.