As an unsupervised young chief trader in Singapore in 1995, Nick Leeson lost US$1.3 billion in frenzied trades in Japanese stock futures and bonds, destroying his employer, the 233-year-old Barings Bank, which had Queen Elizabeth II as a customer.
Now, Leeson, having served four years in prison and having survived colon cancer, has managed to turn those money-losing bets into a money-making enterprise -- warning bankers of their continuing vulnerability to rogue traders.
The paradox is that he is earning a good living from a notorious past, getting ?5,000 (US$9,800) a speech.
Last month, he spoke at an annual dinner of financial regulators in London and then headed to Amsterdam for a speech to a firm of auditors. The previous month, he gave a presentation at a Dublin function on banking scandals, arguing that he should have been stopped by Barings at an early stage. The British bank, he says, was culpable for failing to supervise him and for accepting the bluster of a young trader prepared to disguise trading losses.
Leeson, now 39, has recently been freed from an agreement in which he surrendered some of his earnings to the liquidators of Barings, which was sold to ING of the Netherlands. For over a decade, the liquidators had sought to recover money for creditors of the ruined bank.
Seated in a coffeehouse in Galway, he still looks every bit the chief trader, dressed in pinstripes.
"I suppose it embodies more where I am now in life and the changes I have been through in the last 15 to 20 years," he said about his new start in the west of Ireland. "Life is a little bit more slow-paced, but there is a quality of life which was possibly missing when I was in Singapore, when it was all about succeeding. I am more happy now."
He spoke of his new day job as general manager of Galway's soccer club, in which he is responsible for everything from shirt sponsorship to planning for a potential redevelopment of the club's stadium. "There's a sea change in the way the club is run today," he said.
Leeson joined Barings in 1989 as a back-office clerk but did well enough that he was offered a job in Singapore.
He continued to advance, landing a trading job. His successes led to a salary and bonus that was reportedly more than US$1 million a year in the early 1990s. But at some point, Leeson began taking what amounted to a gamble on the direction of Japanese stock prices and interest rates -- a gamble that began to go wrong early in 1995.
By the end of February, Barings had collapsed under the weight of more than US$1 billion in losses. In December, Leeson pleaded guilty to two criminal charges that he had illegally covered up his trading losses and was sentenced in Singapore to six and a half years in prison.
But after serving a little over half the sentence, he was released in 1999, and offers flooded in. He did a string of television commercials, including one for a Swedish stock brokerage firm, and was paid US$100,000 for an appearance before an audience of bankers and brokers. "Half went to the liquidators, half to me," he said.
He also wrote a book, Rogue Trader, while in prison that was later turned into a movie.
He still trades currencies -- mostly the dollar against the British pound and the euro -- through an account at an online brokerage firm. This time, he says, he feels confident in his trading decisions, contending that he was "ill-disposed" to knowing his limitations 11 years ago.
Speaking last month, he confidently predicted that the dollar had further to fall against the pound and euro.
"If I am risking my money it should be OK," he said. "If I were employed by a bank, it would be a different matter."
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