2011 UBS rogue trader scandal
Unauthorized trading incident
The 2011 UBS rogue trader scandal caused a loss of over US$2 billion at Swiss bank UBS, as a result of unauthorized trading performed by Kweku Adoboli, a director of the bank's Global Synthetic Equities Trading team in London in early September 2011.
On 24 September 2011, Oswald Grübel, the CEO of UBS, resigned "to assume responsibility for the recent unauthorized trading incident", according to a memo to UBS staff. On 5 October Francois Gouws and Yassine Bouhara, the co-heads of Global Equities at UBS, also resigned. It later emerged that UBS had failed to act on a warning issued by its computer system about Adoboli's trading.
After two delays requested by Adoboli and a change of legal representation, Adoboli pleaded not guilty to two counts each of fraud and false accounting on 30 January 2012. He was released on conditional bail after a bail application at Southwark Crown Court on 8 June 2012. He was later convicted of both counts of fraud and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. He appealed against both conviction and sentence.
Incident
On 15 September 2011, Adoboli was arrested under suspicion of fraud in connection with losses then-estimated at US$2 billion, reportedly due to unauthorized trading at the Swiss group's investment bank. A spokesperson from the Swiss banking regulator FINMA referred to the case as one of the biggest ever seen at a Swiss bank.
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