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George Soros failed in a bid to overturn an insider-trading conviction at France's highest appeals tribunal, but vowed to pursue an appeal....... The Court of Cassation, the tribunal of last resort in France, yesterday upheld a March 2005 judgment that Soros violated the law when he bought Societe Generale SA shares in 1988 with knowledge that the bank might be a takeover target. The Hungary-born financier....has been fighting the case for 17 years, will appeal......The verdict came as the 75-year-old former financier turned his attention from his investing career to political and charitable activities.

Her name is Lily Safra... The daughter of a British railway engineer, Lily's ascent from humble origins to fabulous wealth had been little short of dazzling. By the late Nineties, her husband was presiding over a £3 billion fortune - all of which passed to Lily alone when, on the morning of December 3, 1999, Edmond died in a fire, apparently succumbing to fumes in the property's highly reinforced panic room.... Four days later, in a tearful confession, one of Edmond's full-time nursing staff, 41-year-old Ted Maher, admitted to lighting the fire in a doomed bid to stage a heroic...

by Richard Lawrence Poe Monday, November 5, 2007 Permanent LinkMore Columns FOUR YEARS ago, leftist billionaire George Soros vowed to bring down President Bush, but failed. Now he is making another power play, this time in Europe. Soros knows Europe better than he does America. He may get what he wants this time; a reversal of his 2002 criminal conviction for insider trading. On January 29, 2002, a French court convicted Soros of illegal trades in connection with a takeover attempt on a French bank. Soros appealed his conviction twice without success. Now he awaits his fourth trial at...

Bank to Pay Total Penalties of more than $1.3 Billion as part of Resolution with Federal and State Prosecutors and Regulators Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, James D. Robnett, the Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation (“IRS-CI”), and Mark Bialek, Inspector General, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“IG-FRB/CFPB”), announced criminal charges against Société Générale S.A. (“SG” or the “Bank”) consisting of a one-count felony information charging SG with conspiring to violate...

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy's hopes of a political comeback got a boost on Tuesday after a fundraising campaign he spearheaded to avert a financial crisis for his conservative UMP party raised 8.3 million euros in less than a month. The national drive to refill the UMP coffers -- dubbed "Sarkothon" by the media -- underscores Sarkozy's continued star appeal among centre-right voters despite his loss of the presidency to Socialist Francois Hollande in May 2012. With the UMP's finances now largely repaired, Sarkozy can more easily prepare for a possible presidential bid in 2017. For this, he will have...

U.S. Government Investigation Of Gold Price Manipulation Commodities / Gold and Silver 2013March 15, 2013 - 04:16 PM GMT By: Midas Letter Yesterday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulator who ostensibly regulates the banks and major financial institutions who participate in the futures and commodities trading business, announced they were going to examine whether prices are being manipulated in the “world’s largest gold market”, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal. For long time observers of the gold price and the fundamental and not-so-fundamental influences on its price movements, the announcement might have elicited a gasp of...

PARIS — Ex-trader Jerome Kerviel was convicted on all counts today in history's biggest rogue trading scandal, sentenced to at least three years in prison and ordered to pay his former employer damages of €4.9 billion ($6.7 billion) — a sum so staggering it drew gasps in the courtroom. The court rejected defense arguments that the 33-year-old trader was a scapegoat for a financial system gone haywire with greed and the pursuit of profit at any cost — a decision sure to take some pressure off the beleaguered banking system overall. By ordering a tough sentence for a lone trader,...

Why Kerviel is so unsettling By Christopher Caldwell Published: February 8 2008 18:27 | Last updated: February 8 2008 18:27 “You lose a sense of the amounts when you’re doing this kind of job,” the rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel told Agence France-Presse this week. “Everything gets dematerialised. You can get carried away.” It is possible Mr Kerviel was just using the interview to set up his legal defence. French authorities have accused him, after all, of forgery and breach of trust. Mr Kerviel had risen from the back office at Société Générale to become a “warrant arbitragist”. His job was...

A billionaire ally of President George Bush could face a criminal investigation into insider share dealing after selling £100million of shares just days before Societe Generale's rogue-trader losses were reported. Robert Day, a member of the French bank's board, disposed of a million shares on January 9 and 10, plus a further 500,000 on January 18, according to official disclosures to Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF), France's market regulator. The £3.7billion losses at the bank were not disclosed to the public or investors until January 24, despite reports that Societe Generale bosses were aware of the crisis several days earlier....

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...

"Bankers have confirmed that at the end of last year, Jerome Kerviel had generated a colossal hidden profit for the bank of 1.4bn euros," Mr Peston said. "Among the great mysteries of the Kerviel affair is how the French bank could have failed to notice a profit of that size."

PARIS (AFP) - Accused French rogue trader Jerome Kerviel walked free after judges placed him under formal investigation Monday for his role in seven billion dollars of losses at Societe Generale but stopped short of charging him with fraud. Shares in the French bank took a battering as allegations emerged that a board member was guilty of insider trading related to the scandal. Kerviel was freed on bail after being placed under formal investigation for "breach of trust", "falsifying and using falsified documents," and "breaching IT procedures", said his lawyer Elisabeth Meyer. Judges rejected a bid to charge Kerviel, accused...

By Andrew Hurst and Thierry Leveque 44 minutes ago PARIS (Reuters) - Exchange officials warned Societe Generale (SOGN.PA) about rogue trader Jerome Kerviel's deals late last year, a Paris prosecutor said, piling pressure on the French bank to explain why the trades were not discovered earlier. The bank has said it only found out 10 days ago that one of its junior traders had run up a staggering 50 billion euro wager on European share prices, forcing it to unwind the positions into sliding markets at a cost of 4.9 billion euros. French President Nicolas Sarkozy also turned up the...

A French Style of Capitalism Is Now Stained By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and JAD MOUAWAD PARIS — In a country where the hurly-burly of market capitalism has long been viewed with suspicion, Société Générale was a rare Gallic success story — the Chanel or Château Margaux of French banking. The bank pioneered some of the most complex instruments in international finance, earning billions of dollars and the grudging respect of its American and British rivals. So it was a shock to their national pride when top executives of Société Générale found themselves on the seventh floor of the company’s ultramodern...

Heads are likely to roll high in the French financial establishment after it emerged yesterday that President Sarkozy was kept in the dark for three days over the €5 billion (£3.7 billion) fraud by a rogue trader at the Société Générale bank. The wrath of the President, who was apparently told only on Wednesday of trouble at SocGen, added to widespread suspicion that France’s second bank and the Banque de France were too eager to blame Jérôme Kerviel, the solitary trader. As well as Daniel Bouton, SocGen’s chief executive, Christian Noyer, the governor of the central bank, is among those...

“I don’t know where he is,” said Daniel Bouton, the long-standing chief executive and chairman of Société Générale, when he was asked on Thursday about the whereabouts of Jérôme Kerviel, the trader at the centre of one of the biggest frauds in banking history. But while Mr Kerviel’s movements remained unknown, the sequence of events that led to the extraordinary writedown at SocGen was becoming clearer. The trader joined the bank in 2000 and worked in Paris. The first three years of his career were spent in the bank’s so-called “back office” and “middle office”, where trades are settled...

Excerpt - When the Federal Reserve surprised markets with a 0.75 percentage-point cut in the federal-funds target Tuesday morning, the thinking was that concerns about a U.S. recession had so fully enveloped the markets that just about anything could happen. Sure, the thinking went, the Fed was in danger of looking like it had responded to market action rather than an economic report, but if markets were reacting to economic reports, well, it’s all the same in this world these days. However. The revelation that Societe Generale is taking a $7 billion write-down due to the activities of one rogue...

Only one thing will be discussed here in Davos today: the alleged fraud by a trader at SocGen which has cost the French bank €4.9bn, or £3.7bn. I feel slightly sick thinking about it, as I sit surrounded by snow-capped peaks. The sheer scale of the loss is overpowering. It takes the crisis in the global banking markets into a whole new area. So here are the questions: 1) Did it take place in London, where SocGen has a big presence? 2) Is the loss related to mis-valuation of structured finance products, abuse of what is known as the "mark-to-model"...

BACKSTORY 11-08-2002 Dateline: PARIS American billionaire investor George Soros, on trial in a 14-year-old insider trading case, told a court Friday that he didn't have privileged information when he bought shares in French bank Societe Generale. Soros and two other businessmen are on trial at the Paris Criminal Court, accused of benefiting from insider knowledge when they bought the bank's stock in 1988 before a failed takeover that pushed up the price. "I have been in business all my life and I think I know what is insider trading and what isn't," said the president of Soros Fund Management, in...

Société Générale has uncovered a fraud by one of its traders which will have a €4.9bn ($7.16bn) negative impact on the group, France’s second-largest listed bank said on Thursday. The bank also announced further writedowns of €2.05bn related to the global credit crunch and said it would raise €5.5bn through a capital increase to strengthen its balance sheet. The bank said it was in the process of dismissing the Paris-based trader and added that the trader’s managers would leave the company. The fraud echoes a similar blow last year to France’s biggest retail bank, Crédit Agricole, which in September announced...