*This oughta be pretty good. A big financial show-trial from an ambitious minor clerk who figured out how to push undocumented buttons.
*The French might let Kerviel off. They like him. And who can't hate a banker, these days? The financiers lost a trillion almost overnight, and now they're keen to destroy entire European countries. To the lanterne, financial aristocrats.
"If you want to hide a leaf, find a forest. Jérôme Kerviel, alleged to be the world's biggest rogue trader, will attempt to hide a €5bn leaf in a multi-trillion euro forest when he goes on trial in Paris today.
"Mr Kerviel's defence will be horrendously complex – and very simple. His lawyers will admit that what he did in 2007-8 – to bet more than the value of France's second largest bank on a series of trades on stock exchange futures – was insane. However, they will also argue that his actions were rational, even tacitly approved, within a global banking culture which had, itself, broken off relations with reality.
"Put another way, the chief exhibits in Mr Kerviel's defence will be the subprime mortgage crisis and the global financial meltdown of 2008-9. (((You kinda gotta like it, actually. That lawyer must be pretty good. J'accuse!)))
"His legal team will be led by the star of the French bar, Maître Olivier Metzner. They will argue that Mr Kerviel, 33, was not a "rogue" trader at all. He never tried to steal a centime of the hundreds of billions of euros that flickered across his computer-screen.
"Although he repeatedly broke the rules of his bank, Société Générale, and pulverised his nominal trading limits, so did many of his colleagues, Mr Metzner will say. Thousands of computer records of Société Générale trades in 2007 suggest that Mr Kerviel and his colleagues had been bending the rules for 12 months before he was "caught". So long as he was making huge profits – including a €1.5bn (€1.2bn) "surplus" in 2007 – his supervisors said nothing.
"In other words, Mr Kerviel and his lawyers will try to turn France's financial trial of the century into something even bigger: a trial of the world banking industry. They may succeed...."
