French trader jailed for three years and ordered to repay bank €4.9bn

JEROME Kerviel has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to repay Societe Generale’s €4.9 billion trading loss by a judge who said the former trader’s actions threatened the bank’s existence.

“By his deliberate actions, he put in peril the existence of the bank that employed 140,000 people, of which he was a part, and whose future was threatened,” Judge Dominique Pauthe said in finding Kerviel guilty of breach of trust, forging documents and computer hacking.

The 2008 trading loss was the biggest ever and prompted then-chief executive officer Daniel Bouton to describe Kerviel as a “terrorist”. The court placed the blame for the loss on Kerviel alone, rejecting defence arguments that his superiors knew of his actions and that the bank’s decision to unwind the bets over three days of falling markets caused the loss.