French rogue trader Jerome Kerviel has been jailed for three years for a massive fraud scandal at the Société Générale bank.
Kerviel was found guilty by a court in Paris of a breach of trust, computer abuse and forgery.
The affair almost brought down Société Générale, which is one of Europe's biggest banks.
Société Générale says it lost nearly €5bn due to Kerviel's covert stock trades.
Kerviel has been given a further two-year suspended sentence and has been ordered to pay the bank damages of €4.9bn.
Kerviel's lawyer had called for the 33-year-old to be acquitted, blaming the bank for the 2008 rogue trading scandal that almost destroyed it and claiming that the trader's bosses knew what he was up to.
But presiding judge Dominique Pauthe told the court that defence evidence heard in his trial in June 'does not allow us to deduce that Societe Generale was aware of Jerome Kerviel's fraudulent activities'.
Kerviel 'exceeded his mandate by taking speculative positions without the knowledge of the bank, on a gigantic scale,' he added.
He dodged a crowd of reporters when he arrived at the court shortly before 10am, slipping into the courtroom through a side-door accompanied by police and his lawyer.
Kerviel admitted regularly exceeding trading limits and logging false transactions to cover his gambles, but said this was common practice among traders and that his bosses turned a blind eye as long as earnings were high.
At the last trial hearing in June, his lawyer Olivier Metzner asked how a 'normal boy' like Kerviel could 'end up here', facing years in jail on charges of breach of trust, forgery and entering false data into computers.
Kerviel's former employers and the state prosecutors bringing criminal charges branded him a liar who knowingly misled his bosses and put Societe Generale and its employees in peril.
On discovering the risky deals in January 2008, Societe Generale was forced to unwind positions worth 50bn - equal to nearly all its shareholder capital at the time.
