Posted on 02/01/2008 12:20:14 PM PST by BurbankKarl
PARIS -- Société Générale says wayward trader Jérôme Kerviel lost the bank $7.2 billion. But that was last week. He's now on his way to cult celebrity -- and he still hasn't lost his job.
Société Générale has stopped paying Mr. Kerviel and told him not to come to the office, but it hasn't managed to formally fire him. French law stipulates that to do that, the bank must first call him in for a sit-down meeting and explain its dissatisfaction. He has the right to bring along a trade-union official, a lawyer or anyone else he'd like.
That will be complicated: A pair of Paris judges this week released Mr. Kerviel from custody but forbade him to have contact with the bank. "This is a very peculiar case," says Emmanuel Dockès, a law professor at l'Université Lyon 2, Mr. Kerviel's alma mater in central France.
Reviled by Société Générale as a malevolent fraudster and "mutating virus," Mr. Kerviel, 31 years old, is now being hailed by a growing band of fans as "Robin Hood," "the Che Guevara of Finance" and even a genius worthy of the Nobel Prize in economics.
"Let's be honest: No one likes banks...and people like the rich to get cheated," says Christophe Rocancourt, a celebrated French con man who swindled wealthy Americans in the 1990s by masquerading as a French member of the Rockefeller family, a film producer and various other people.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
You know - the American economy has some real problems - but we will NEVER lose to these bozo French...
France...ugh.
How do you mean? Our frauds are better than theirs?
If Hitlery or Obama is elected president, we could.
That ought to be a fun meeting, since Kerviel was undoubtedly doing exactly what his superiors implied or directly told him to do, despite their pathetic attempts to establish plausible deniability.
Bob Slydell: Milton Waddams.
Dom Portwood: Who’s he?
Bob Porter: You know, squirrely looking guy, mumbles a lot.
Dom Portwood: Oh, yeah.
Bob Slydell: Yeah, we can’t actually find a record of him being a current employee here.
Bob Porter: I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him about it; but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck.
Bob Slydell: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Bill Lumbergh: Great.
Dom Portwood: So, uh, Milton has been let go?
Bob Slydell: Well, just a second there, professor. We, uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won’t be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it’ll just work itself out naturally.
Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end.
That’s a mighty fine looking neck!
Richard Chesler: Get the f*** out of here, you’re fired!
Narrator: I have a better solution. You keep me on the payroll as an outside consultant and in exchange for my salary, my job will be never to tell people these things that I know. I don’t even have to come into the office, I can do this job from home.
-Fight Club
...a change in Mr. Kerviel's public image from recklessly greedy master-of-the-universe to luckless little guy struggling to get ahead. Unlike Societe Generale's executives, mostly upper-crust graduates of elite colleges, Mr. Kerviel grew up in a small provincial town in a family of modest means.
You see, he's the real victim here. His dad was a lowly mill worker who never went to college, and he was doing his unauthorized trading for the little guy, because you see there are two Frances, one for the -- oh wait, that's John Edwards.
Hopefully, he will try to “organize the traders” among a group of American Indians, who will then turn his white a-s over to the authorities. That’s what happened to Ernesto Guevara-Lynch.
You know, he could sue to get his back pay.
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