Jerome Kerviel took risks 'no bank in the world could take' and lied to hide billions lost in risky deals, one of his former bosses from Société Générale said today at the ex-trader's trial.
The bank alleges Kerviel gambled away €4.9 billion in risky stock market trades, in a case seen as a symbol of the banking excesses blamed for the financial crisis.
Jean-Pierre Mustier, the former head of Société Générale's investment division in which Kerviel worked on the 'Delta One' trading desk, stood inches away from the accused and reproached him for his 'inhuman' risk-taking.
Société Générale, one of Europe's biggest banks, said it suffered the heavy losses when it was forced to unravel €50 billion of unauthorised trades when it discovered the fraud in January 2008.
Kerviel says his bosses encouraged him to take risks and turned a blind eye to excesses as long as earnings were rolling in. The 33-year-old admitted that he frequently passed trading limits and logged fake transactions to cover his gambles, accusing the bank of tolerating such breaches of trading limits.
'It was a common practice,' Kerviel told the court. 'Every morning we got an email informing us of limits being exceeded,' he said, but there was never a reprimand.
Mustier stepped down as head of investment banking in May 2008 in the wake of the Kerviel scandal and left the bank altogether last year. He was subject to an insider-trading investigation by the French market regulator AMF, which has yet to rule on his case.
The former executive told the court he had comforted Kerviel when the trader became anxious and apparently suicidal at an early stage in the bank's investigation of his dealings.
At yesterday's hearing the ex-trader presented himself as an ordinary, hard-working man, now a computer consultant earning €2,300 a month - a big mark-down from the tens of thousands he earned as a trader.
Kerviel risks a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of €375,000 if convicted on charges of breach of trust, falsifying and using fake documents and entering false data into company computers.
Branded a crook by his ex-employer but seen by others as a scapegoat, Kerviel faces criminal charges along with civil suits by the bank and other plaintiffs, including employees and shareholders.
