Kweku Adoboli, 31, posted a strange message on his Facebook account as he tried to recover enormous losses he had made through illegal trading.
London Police detained the suspected rogue trader, who works for Swiss banking group UBS in raid at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday at his luxury London flat.
Kweku Adoboli is Ghanaian origin, but he was privately educated in UK and is the son of a retired UN worker. He is accused of being responsible for the biggest loss ever accrued by a single trader based in London.
The $2 billion fraud figure easily dwarfs the $1.3 billion lost by rogue trader Nick Leeson, the man behind the collapse of Barings bank in 1995.
The same amount was intended by UBS to save by cutting 3,500 jobs worldwide.
Speculation was mounting that he may have been caught out after the Swiss Central Bank unexpectedly devalued the franc last week, producing mammoth losses on one of his currency trades.
Kweku Adoboli’s boss John Hughes is reported to have quit his job in the aftermath of the scandal. Sources said Hughes would have faced serious questions about supervision of staff. The former boss could not be reached for comment last night.
It is understood that UBS have discovered the $2 billion loss late on Wednesday afternoon.
City of London Police commander Ian Dyson said the force was tipped off by UBS at 1:00 a.m. on Thursday.
Within three hours, police had entered UBS headquarter and had also arrested Kweku Adoboli, who according to sources was a “work-hard, play-hard” trader who enjoyed the company of a series of attractive women at his flat in Whitechapel, East London.
According to some sources, Adoboli earned around $300,000 a year, plus up to $600,000 more in bonuses.
Kweku Adoboli was formally arrested on suspicion of fraud by abuse of position, and was still in custody last night. Police are liaising closely with the Crown Prosecution Service and a decision on charges could be made over the weekend.
Kweku Adoboli was detained on the anniversary day of the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers three years ago.
Rogue traders act independently of colleagues (often recklessly), harming both clients and the firm they work for. In most cases this type of trading is high risk and can create enormous losses.
Police questioned Kweku Adoboli about the fraud, but it was unclear how he was allegedly able to lose such eye-watering sums without being detected by UBS’s risk management team.
Kweku Adoboli joined UBS in 2006 as a trainee investment adviser. He took on a more senior role as a trade support analyst in 2007 before assuming his present role in one of the banking world’s most important trading areas.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Kweku Adoboli worked as director of Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) and Delta-1 Trading at UBS Investment Bank.
ETFs are an investment fund traded on stock exchanges, much like stocks, which holds assets such as stocks, commodities, or bonds.
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