Fraudulent transactions by a trader named Jerome Kerviel have cost one of France’s biggest banks, Societe Generale, $7.1 billion (4.9 billion euros), and Kerviel is now on the lam. According to the story in the New York Times:The trader “had taken massive fraudulent directional positions in 2007 and 2008 far beyond his limited authority,” the bank said.“Aided by his in-depth knowledge of the control procedures resulting from his former employment in the middle office, he managed to conceal these positions through a scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions.”Initially, it reminds of the individual con man movies like The Hoax and Catch Me if You Can, but this quote–“one person could engineer it, but how could one person finance it?”–from a bank’s chief executive hints at a high-finance Ocean’s Eleven.
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