Former ‘rogue trader’ Nick Leeson joins corporate private eye firm
Nick Leeson, the former rogue trader who caused the collapse of Barings Bank 28 years ago, has joined a firm of corporate private investigators.
The firm, Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit, advertises financial investigation services to investors seeking compensation in court cases, according to an interview with Leeson published by Bloomberg.
Leeson was imprisoned for about four years in Singapore after he tried to conceal as much as £827m in secret trades. His actions ultimately brought down Barings, the City’s oldest merchant bank, in 1995.
He triggered a global manhunt before his arrest after fleeing Baring’s Singapore offices and leaving a note which read: “I’m sorry.” He was eventually captured at an airport in Frankfurt.
According to Leeson’s autobiography, Rogue Trader, he followed a particular ethos at Barings: “We were all driven to make profits, profits and more profits … I was the rising star.”
But despite being lauded as a star trader at one stage, it emerged that he had a dossier of hidden trades in a file, Error Account 88888. He hopes that his first-hand experience will help him spot fraudsters, and believes that higher interest rates will flush out cracks in business models that were concealed in an era of cheap borrowing.
“I have also been on the other side of the equation and understand the psychology of some of the people involved,” Leeson, who is now based in Galway, Ireland, told Bloomberg.
“It often doesn’t start out as fraud. In the beginning it’s a decision between pleasing everyone around them or highlighting the fact that they’re failing and something is going wrong with the organisation. And that’s kind of how it happened at Barings,” he said.
“That will always be an intense embarrassment. But you’ve
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