I feel a tinge of guilt drawing 'Ghana' into this but uhm well, I guess it's just expedient.

“A LESSON”. This was how Charles Sherrard, a lawyer for Kweku Adoboli, described the trial against the former UBS trader whose activities led to losses of nearly $2.3 billion, when he closed his case. And a lesson it was—for all involved: for the 32-year old Ghanaian-born Mr Adoboli, who will spend up to seven years in prison after a jury in London’s Southwark Crown Court found him guilty on two counts of fraud on
November 20th; for the jury itself, who had a hard time understanding the financial jargon cited during the trial; and for the once-esteemed Swiss bank, which was more than just a victim. Mr Adoboli was picked for a full-time job at UBS after spending a successful summer internship at one of its London offices while studying at Nottingham University. On campus he soon became an ambassador for the bank, drawing in new recruits for its once growing staff—many of whom recently discovered they no longer work there. Having impressed management, Mr Adoboli moved out of the back office in October 2008 and soon became a successful trader, making large profits on an exchange-traded funds (ETF) desk. This success at such a young age—he and his colleague John Hughes were just 26 and 24 respectively when they began running the desk—must have given Mr Adoboli’s the confidence to do as he saw fit. At any rate, after his ever-bigger trades went sour during three volatile months last summer, he amassed the biggest loss in British banking history.

Continued below

The “unprotected, unhedged, incautious, reckless” trading, as prosecutor Sasha Wass described it, appears to have turned jurors against Mr Adoboli. His conviction for fraud applies to two indictment periods, one in which he generated large profits for the bank and another in which he amassed the hefty losses. Mr Adoboli’s failed to convince the jury that everything he did was for the good of the bank. Instead, they sided with Ms Wass, who had argued that the trader had engaged in “protracted and sophisticated manipulation to puff up his earnings”. Mr Adoboli had also argued that his colleagues knew of and even occasionally used the same trading methods. Indeed, Mr Hughes admitted in court he had accessed a secret account nicknamed “umbrella”, which Mr Adoboli had set up to conceal risk exposure and losses. Other witnesses, too, said they knew of its existence. This may be why the
jury did not find Mr Adoboli guilty of the four charges of false accounting he also faced.
But it seems strange to convict him on grounds of dishonesty motivated by self- aggrandisement, and not for the mechanisms that he is supposed to have used. Mr Adoboli’s other line of defence was that UBS’s management had encouraged him to
take greater risk. “There’s a difference between policy and practice,” he said in the witness box. In an internal memo in early 2008, for instance, staff was warned of the fate of Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader at Société Générale, a French bank. At the same time, UBS’s management allegedly told Mr Adoboli to bring in higher profits. . Kerviel recently lost his appeal against fraud charges. One of Mr Adoboli’s mistakes was to defend him in court. Culture at UBS clearly changed under Oswald Grübel and other executives drafted in 2009 from Deutsche Bank—something Philip Allison, the bank’s head of cash equities, admitted in his testimony. “I’d actually like to see us put more risk on the table,” Mr Grübel said in November 2009. He got what he wished for: risk limits at the ETF desk were increased; punishment for taking excessive risk taking was weak. Mr Adoboli received only a warning for exceeding risk limits in January 2011. A mechanism for verifying counterparties and settlement dates was mysteriously switched off until his activities were exposed. Immediately following the verdict, UBS said in a statement it was “glad” the trial was over. It must be: now it can begin torestore to its reputation.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/11/ubs’s-rogue-trader

Where is that guy called REDSUN that has or see nothing good about nigeria and nigerians? He sees ghanaians as supernatural beigns....buncha MENSSAHS...

^ The spambot got me for some inesplicable reasons but I'd not intended the thread to be a Ghana bashing one. My hidden post highlights areas that seem to suggest the convicted trader was more a victim of an adventure gone awry than a rogue trader.

wesley08: ^ The spambot got me for some inesplicable reasons but I'd not intended the thread to be a Ghana bashing one. My hidden post highlights areas that seem to suggest the convicted trader was more a victim of an adventure gone awry than a rogue trader.

dat spambot de craze.... But , do try again. Ghana need some bashing....they've stepped on our toes for too long....payback time...