Jakarta -Wearing a neat black suit with his hands handcuffed, Jerome Kerviel, 33 years old, was found guilty of breach of trust, computer abuse, and forgery, receiving a 5-year prison sentence. Kerviel was proven to have ‘hacked’ the Societe Generale bank for US$ 4.9 billion in 2008.
The court in Paris also ordered Kerviel to return the funds he ’embezzled’ amounting to 4.9 billion euros or approximately US$ 6.8 billion to the French bank.
The judge ruled that Kerviel did not have authorization, and even secretly from his superiors, engaged in excessive speculation. The judge also determined that Kerviel certainly knew that what he was doing exceeded his authority as a broker and that he tried to hide his trading positions.
“Kerviel deliberately exceeded his authority as a trader,” explained Chief Judge Dominique Pauthe, as quoted by Reuters.
The judge ordered Kerviel to serve 3 years in prison with the remaining 2 years suspended. The public prosecutor had previously demanded that Kerviel be imprisoned for 4 years and suspended for 5 years.
Kerviel’s lawyer, Olivier Metzner, said they would appeal the decision. He also deemed the decision ‘heartless’ and the prison sentence ‘excessive’.
Jerome Kerviel shocked the world with a breach worth 4.9 billion euros or around 67 trillion IDR at that time.
Kerviel joined Societe Generale in 2000 and has been in the trading department since 2005. Kerviel was just an ordinary worker, until the largest bank in France discovered the world-shocking embezzlement. Kerviel’s photo adorned almost all the media in the world because of his actions.
Kerviel was known to have used SocGen’s funds to trade in the futures market. He managed to hide the losses from the transactions he conducted. This action was only discovered when there was turmoil in the stock market. SocGen even had to sell the contracts made by Kerviel when the stock prices were falling.
Reportedly, Kerviel had speculated with SocGen’s money up to more than 50 billion euros. However, after the sell-off of all the stock transactions, it was found that SocGen suffered a loss of around 4.9 billion euros.
As a result of Kerviel’s actions, combined with the impact of the subprime crisis, SocGen was only able to record a profit of 600-800 million euros. Very contrasting compared to the net profit in 2006 of 5.2 billion euros.