Rogue trader gets taken in by French police over Societe Generale record bank loss

Bloomberg reported that former trader Jerome Kerviel has been taken charge of by French police after prosecutors have said that he failed to turn himself in. Kerviel was convicted of abusing the bank's trust, faking documents and entering false data in his trades into computers, which had led to former employer Societe Generale post a record loss of 4.9 billion euros. It has been said that the former trader entered over 50 billion euros ($68.5 billion) of unauthorized loss, which is way past the market value of the second-largest lender in France.

Kerviel was reportedly held by police in Menton, which is near the country's border with Italy, to provide instructions on his three-year jail sentence. Bloomberg said that the 37 year-old had been given a deadline until midnight yesterday to surrender to the police.

In a Bloomberg Television interview over his four-kilometer walk between an Italian village called Latte and the border post located along the Mediterranean cost towards Menton, Kerviel said, "I am ashamed to have been part of this system. I was in the system and I let myself get drawn into the system."

Aside from the unauthorized bets, Kerviel made headlines for his 1,400-kilometer walk from Rome to Paris aimed to bring the message of Pop Francis' attack on the "tyranny" of financial markets, the former trader said. Kerviel said that he had sought President Francois Hollande to gain an appeal for his case but was supposedly shut down. The AFP, on the other hand, reported that Hollande would examine any requests for a presidential pardon and will be considered after a probe and advice from the country's justice ministry has been obtained.

Bloomberg sad Kerviel gained cult status in the aftermath of the 2008 loss in France. His feat of being able to rise through the ranks at Societe Generale's trading floor without having attended any of the country's elite schools was something to be considered.

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Jerome Kerviel, Jerome Kerviel custody, Societe Generale SA

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