Some More Laurent Kerviel Stories

French Bank Offers Details of Big Loss

By DAVID JOLLY and NICOLA CLARK

Published: January 27, 2008

PARIS — The French bank Société Générale offered greater detail on Sunday about how it said a low-level former trader carried out fraudulent trades that led to more than $7 billion in losses.

The release of the five-page document came as the accused trader, Jérôme Kerviel, 31, spent a second day in police custody. (Text of the Report click here)

Société Générale said Sunday that Mr. Kerviel had misappropriated other people’s computer access codes, falsified documents to enter fictitious trades and employed other methods to cover his tracks helped by his years of experience working in offices that monitor traders.

Until now, the bank, one of Europe’s largest, has insisted that Mr. Kerviel was the lone architect of elaborate trades that involved betting tens of billions of dollars of the bank’s money on European stock index futures. But during a conference call with reporters on Sunday, Jean-Pierre Mustier, chief executive of the bank’s corporate and investment banking arm, said: “I cannot guarantee to you 100 percent that there was no complicity,” The Associated Press reported.

So far, there has been no suggestion that Mr. Kerviel personally profited from the trades.

Talking to reporters Sunday in Paris outside the headquarters of the French financial police, Jean-Michel Aldebert, head of the financial section of the Paris court, said the questioning of Mr. Kerviel had so far been “extremely fruitful.”

He declined to give details of the interrogation, other than to say the trader addressed “the operations that Société Générale described as fictitious.” Mr. Kerviel, he said, had been explaining “what had happened in very interesting ways.”

Mr. Aldebert added that Mr. Kerviel’s state of mind seemed stable. “According to what he told me, he’s doing fine.”

Mr. Aldebert said the court had decided a decision to continue to hold Mr. Kerviel. On Monday, the trader is to be transferred to the main financial judiciary office in Paris, where he will see a judge. Under French law, Kerviel must either be released or face preliminary charges by Monday afternoon.

The Paris prosecutor’s office formally opened an investigation of Mr. Kerviel on Friday after Société Générale filed a complaint accusing him of falsifying bank records and computer fraud. The bank, which says it first uncovered the deals on Jan. 18, was ultimately forced to undo Mr. Kerviel’s trades early last week, leading to losses of 4.9 billion euros, or $7.2 billion, and requiring Société Générale to seek 5.5 billion euros in fresh capital.

The bank’s efforts to release new information appeared to be an attempt to quash widespread speculation that Mr. Kerviel had either exploited weaknesses in the bank’s internal controls or had had an accomplice.

French investigators on Saturday began examining documents and computer files obtained during two raids late on Friday, at Mr. Kerviel’s residence and at the bank offices where he had worked.

A lawyer for Mr. Kerviel, Elisabeth Meyer, could not be reached Sunday for comment. She did not return e-mail messages or answer her phone.

Laura Schalk, a Société Générale spokeswoman, said officers of the financial police had searched the bank’s offices in La Défense, a business district west of Paris, on Friday night. “They were there mostly to collect data from the trader’s electronic files,” she said.

The bank’s management has come under increasing pressure from French officials to come forward with a more detailed accounting of how Mr. Kerviel could have amassed such enormous losses by himself, over the course of a year, without raising any red flags among supervisors or internal auditors.

Daniel Bouton, Société Générale’s chief executive, has said Mr. Kerviel used in-depth knowledge of the bank’s risk-control software systems that he had gained from a previous back-office position. In an interview published Saturday in the French newspaper Le Figaro, Mr. Bouton described Mr. Kerviel’s efforts to hide his activities as being like a “mutating virus.” Mr. Bouton said, “The nature of his fictitious and fraudulent operations were constantly evolving.” He added, “And when the control systems detected an anomaly, he managed to convince control officers that it was nothing more than a minor error.”

At the financial police headquarters in Paris, there was an unusual amount of activity for a Sunday, with police cars coming and going, some with sirens blaring. There are bars on the fourth floor, on the left hand side, on windows of the 10-story building where Mr. Kerviel was being interrogated.

Michel Histel, 62, a retiree who lives nearby and who, like many French people has been avidly following the story, described the scene as “very exceptional.”

“What’s so surprising about this to me is that they brought this young man so quickly to the financial police headquarters,” Mr. Histel said. “What is a little bit revolting to me is that people are attacking this young man.”

“But this bank has been playing with fire for a long time,” he said, referring to Société Générale’s leadership in financial derivatives products.