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Trader sentenced for SocGen scandal

Summary

6 October 2010

A court in Paris has sentenced Jerome Kerviel to three years in jail for unauthorised financial deals that nearly ruined the French bank, Societe Generale, in 2008. Kerviel has also been ordered to pay back almost five billion euros.

Reporter:

Christian Fraser

Report

He painted himself as a pawn in a system that drove him to take risks. But today the court ruled that Jerome Kerviel should take sole responsibility for one of the biggest banking frauds in history.

He was sentenced to three years behind bars and instructed to pay back the 4.9 billion euros of debt he'd run up. For Kerviel, now a computer consultant on 26,000 euros a year, that is a lifetime sentence.

The bank will be pleased with this verdict. His managers could not have known, nor suspected, said the court, what he was up to. But Kerviel was gambling with more than the bank's entire stock market value.