Irish Examiner view: Profit motive is ever present

Nick Leeson is known as the 'rogue trader' who brought down the Barings Bank in 1995. Picture: Niall Carson/PA Wire

In the cut-throat world of international finance, just as in cyber security, there is clearly some attachment to the merits of working with a poacher turned gamekeeper. 

Thus it is that corporate network managers and virus protection companies have been known to hire hackers to test and attempt to defeat the resilience of their systems. 

And financial companies also have a predilection for advice from experts who have taken a walk on the wild side.

Nick Leeson, once infamous as the “rogue trader” who brought down Barings Bank in 1995 when it declared losses of £827m, twice its available trading capital, is a man with a long connection to Ireland including a spell as commercial manager and CEO for Galway United FC. He once told an interviewer: “I’ve moved on and, hopefully, so has everyone else.”

Mr Leeson’s latest transition, during what appears to be a turbulent year in financial services, is to join a corporate investigations firm, Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit, which advises investors pursuing compensation. 

He told Bloomberg he hopes his experience will help him spot fraudsters. He believes the end of the era of low interest rates will reveal weaknesses in business models that were once concealed. His colleagues include other traders and businesspeople who have faced their own legal challenges during the past 15 years.

While this determinedly post-modern approach to rooting out problems clearly has its attractions, news of Mr Leeson’s new role comes, coincidentally, in the same week as the 45th anniversary of the first woman being allowed as a dealer on the floor of the London Stock Exchange. 

She was Janet McCall who took up her role at broker Wedd Durlacher accompanied by some breathless reporting from the (male-dominated) press. The Financial Times observed that one article noted that the 22-year-old “pretty brunette” from Essex, who was joining a team of 84 men, did not have “a special boyfriend” in her life at that point. 

It’s difficult to imagine anyone writing such a sentence, other than as a spoof, in 2023.

Since that “radical” move Stock Exchange business has changed immeasurably, accelerated by “Big Bang” deregulation in 1986 and the instant trading cycle which has come to dominate our waking and sleeping hours. One thing has not changed — the appetite for profit and personal gain — with its potential to help or hinder. 

Whether greed “captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit”, as the movie character Gordon Gekko proclaimed one year after the Big Bang, there is no denying that it is an ever-present in our lives, bringing with it an ever-increasing consumption which threatens to overwhelm the resources of our planet.