PARIS, Sept 20 — Jerome Kerviel, the former French investment banker whose trades cost his employer Societe Generale €4.9 billion (RM23.8 billion), lost a legal bid today to force a retrial following his 2010 conviction, lawyers said.
A French legal commission that deals with requests for retrials “has decided that there was nothing new, that Mr Kerviel’s request was without basis,” a lawyer acting for Societe Generale, Jean Veil, told reporters.
Kerviel was sentenced to a five-year prison term in 2010, with two years suspended, for breach of trust, forgery and entering false data over his huge trading losses which he attempted to hide from the bank.
The losses amount to US$5.8 billion (RM28.2 billion) at current exchange rates and brought the French bank to the brink of bankruptcy.
The former trader, now aged 41, has fought a 10-year legal battle against his former employer, alleging that his superiors were aware of his trading and then attempted to influence the legal investigation.
Kerviel, who was released from jail after four months behind bars, has lost two previous appeals against his convictions in 2012 and 2014.
The former trader remains “determined to see the rule of law triumph,” his lawyer Julien Dami Le Coz told reporters today, adding that “this is certainly not the end of the story.”
To succeed with his bid for a retrial — a rare occurence in France — Kerviel needed to present credible, new evidence that cast doubt on his conviction.
He had pinned his hopes on revelations by a former detective in the case who presented recordings of a former prosecutor, Chantal de Leiris, saying it was “obvious” that the bank was aware of Kerviel’s trading.
Kerviel has also alleged in the past that Societe Generale interfered with a witness and that his immediate superior Eric Cordelle was paid a bribe of €1 million to testify in the bank’s favour.
Legal battles
French magistrates have repeatedly rejected his claims as inadmissible in the past.
In 2016, an appeal court cancelled most of the compensation Kerviel was initially ordered to pay Societe Generale, however, ruling that the bank was partly to blame because of “woefully inadequate” internal checks.
The deficiencies and “managerial choices... gave an ill-intentioned employee such as Jerome Kerviel a wide scope of action,” the appeal court said, ruling that Kerviel should pay €1 million in compensation.
As a result of the ruling, the French state began the process to recover €2.2 billion of tax breaks given to Societe Generale in the wake of the scandal to stop it going bankrupt.
A French labour court also ordered Societe Generale to pay €455,000 eros to Kerviel for unfair dismissal in 2016.
Kerviel, the son of a blacksmith from rural Brittany, continues to divide opinion in France and has become a trenchant critic of “casino capitalism”.
Many believe he is a scapegoat, while others think he should pay the price for his actions. — AFP
