Nick Leeson

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Nicholas "Nick" Leeson (born February 25, 1967) is a former derivatives trader whose unsupervised and unauthorized speculative trading on Singapore's Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX) caused the spectacular collapse of Barings Bank, the United Kingdom's oldest investment bank. He is currently the CEO of Irish football club Galway United.[1]
Contents
1 Early life
2 Singapore
3 Fall
4 Aftermath
5 Publications
6 Notes
7 See also
8 External links
Early life

Leeson was born in Watford, a blue-collar town north-west of London where he attended Parmiter's School and excelled, becoming a prefect. After finishing school in 1984, having been in the Sixth Form, he landed a job as a clerk with an exclusive private bank, Coutts, followed by a string of jobs with other banks, ultimately ending up with Barings in the early 1990s.
Singapore

In 1992, following his first marriage, he was appointed general manager of a new operation in futures markets on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX).[2] Barings had held a seat on SIMEX for some time, but did not activate it until Leeson was sent over.
From 1992, Leeson made unauthorized speculative trades that at first made large profits for Barings; £10 million which accounted for 10% of Barings' annual income. He earned a bonus of £130,000 on his salary of £50,000 for that year.
However, his luck soon went sour, and he used one of Barings' error accounts (accounts used to correct mistakes made in trading) to hide his losses. The account was numbered 88888 -- a number considered very lucky in Chinese numerology. Leeson claims that this account was first used to hide an error made by one of his colleagues; rather than buy 20 contracts as the customer had ordered, she had sold them, costing Barings £20,000.
However, Leeson used this account to cover further bad trades. He insists that he never used the account for his own gain, but in 1996 the New York Times quoted "British press reports" as claiming that investigators had located approximately $35 million in various bank accounts tied to him.[2]
Management at Barings Bank also allowed Leeson to remain Chief Trader while being responsible for settling his trades, jobs that are usually done by two different people. This made it much simpler for him to hide his losses from his superiors.
Fall

By the end of 1992, the account's losses exceeded £2 million, which ballooned to £208 million by the end of 1994.
There were clues in Leeson's lifestyle off the trading floor that he was headed for trouble. In October 1994 he was arrested and spent a night in a Singaporean jail after an incident in which he exposed his buttocks in public to two women. His superiors at Barings persuaded The International Financing Review to re-write a planned reference to the incident in its gossip column to cover it up.
The beginning of the end occurred on January 16, 1995, when Leeson placed a short straddle in the Stock Exchange of Singapore and Tokyo stock exchanges, essentially betting that the Japanese stock market would not move significantly overnight. However, the Kobe earthquake hit early in the morning on January 17, sending Asian markets, and Leeson's investments, into a tailspin. Leeson attempted to recoup his losses by making a series of increasingly risky new investments, this time betting that the Nikkei Stock Average would make a rapid recovery. But the recovery failed to materialize, and he succeeded only in digging a deeper hole.
Realising the gravity of the situation, Leeson left a note reading "I'm Sorry" and fled on February 23. Losses eventually reached £827 million (US$1.4 billion), twice the bank's available trading capital. After a failed bailout attempt, Barings was declared insolvent on February 26.
After fleeing to Malaysia, Thailand and finally Germany, Leeson was arrested and extradited back to Singapore on March 2, 1995, though his wife Lisa was allowed to return to England. While he had authorisation for the January 15 short straddle, he was charged with fraud for deceiving his superiors about the riskiness of his activities and the scale of his losses. Several observers (and Leeson himself) have placed much of the blame on the bank's own deficient internal auditing and risk management practices. Indeed, the Singapore authorities' report on the collapse was scathingly critical of Barings management, claiming that senior officials knew or should have known about the "five eights" account.
Sentenced to six and a half years in Changi Prison in Singapore, he was released from prison in 1999, having been diagnosed with colon cancer, which he survived despite grim forecasts at the time.
While in prison, in 1996, Leeson published an autobiography, Rogue Trader, detailing his acts. A review in the financial columns of the New York Times stated, "This is a dreary book, written by a young man very taken with himself, but it ought to be read by banking managers and auditors everywhere."[2] In 1999, the book was made into a film of the same name starring Ewan McGregor and Anna Friel.
Aftermath

Nick Leeson's first wife Lisa divorced him while he was in prison. He married an Irish beautician, Leona Tormay, in 2003[3] and they now live in Barna, County Galway in the west of Ireland. He is a regular guest on the after-dinner speaking circuit. He was appointed Commercial Manager of Galway United Football Club in April 2005, rising to the position of General Manager in late November 2005. By July 2007 he had become the club's CEO.[4] He still finds time to deal in the stock markets, but only with his own money.[5]
In June 2005, Leeson released a new book Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress. It picks up his story where Rogue Trader left off, including in-depth conversations with psychologist Ivan Tyrrell asserting how the prolonged periods of severe stress that affected Leeson's mental and physical health have parallels in many other people's lives.
Publications

Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World by Nick Leeson and Edward Whitley (Mar 1996, hardcover) ISBN 0-316-51856-5; (1997, softcover) ISBN 0-7515-1708-9
Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress (2005) - ISBN 0-7535-1075-8
Notes

^ Galway United FC Official Site - Galway United Club Directory
^ a b c Norris, Floyd. "Upper-Class Twits Made Me Do It." New York Times, 31 March 1996. Available here.
^ "Rogue trader Leeson ties knot with Irish love", Irish Independent (14 June 2003). Retrieved on 15 December 2008.
^ "'Rogue trader' named football CEO", BBC (27 July 2007). Retrieved on 27 July 2007.
^ Rogue trader Leeson 'eyes deals'