Nick Leeson - Career

Career

In 1992 he was appointed general manager of a new operation in futures markets on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX). Barings had held a seat on SIMEX for some time, but did not activate it until Leeson was sent over. Leeson was sent to Singapore after he was denied a broker's license in the United Kingdom because of fraud on his application. Neither Leeson nor Barings disclosed this denial when Leeson applied for his license in Singapore.

In October 1994, Leeson was arrested in Singapore for an incident involving mooning.

From 1992, Leeson made unauthorized speculative trades that at first made large profits for Barings: £10 million, which accounted for 10% of Barings' annual income. He earned a bonus of £130,000 on his salary of £50,000 for that year.

However, his luck soon went sour and he used one of Barings' error accounts (accounts used to correct mistakes made in trading) to hide his losses. The account was numbered 88888 – 8 being a number considered to be very lucky in Chinese numerology. Leeson claims that this account was first used to hide an error made by one of his colleagues; rather than buy 20 contracts as the customer had ordered, she had sold them, costing Barings £20,000.

However, Leeson used this account to cover further bad trades. He insists that he never used the account for his own gain, but in 1996 the New York Times quoted "British press reports" as claiming that investigators had located approximately $35 million in various bank accounts tied to him.

Management at Barings Bank also allowed Leeson to remain Chief Trader while also being responsible for settling his trades, jobs usually done by two different people. This made it much simpler for him to hide his losses from his superiors.