£1.4bn rogue trader guilty of fraud

Nov 20 2012

A rogue trader who lost £1.4 billion in bad deals which nearly brought down a major international bank has been found guilty of fraud.

At one point during his run of losses, rising star City trader Kweku Adoboli, 32, stood to run up losses of 12 billion US dollars (£7.5 billion) for employer UBS.

The Ghanaian-born former public schoolboy exceeded his multi million-pound trading limits and failed to hedge trades, allegedly faking records to cover his tracks at the Swiss bank's London office.

He admitted the losses but claimed that he was pressured by staff to take risks, culminating in bad deals which wiped £2.8 billion off the bank's share value when they were discovered.

The jury at Southwark Crown Court, in London, has convicted him of one count of fraud linked to the £1.4 billion loss.

The panel is still deliberating on one further count of fraud and four counts of false accounting between October 2008 and September last year.