French find new hero in rogue trader who nearly broke the bank
PARIS (AFP) — Many in France, where suspicion of globalisation and financial markets runs deep, have found a new hero in a young man who subverted the system and allegedly lost his bank five billion euros.
For Societe Generale bank, trader Jerome Kerviel is a "crook, fraudster and terrorist" but for many here Kerviel is a scapegoat whose action has exposed what they see as the outrageous greed of global finance.
"He is the product of a system that pushes people into taking huge risks in the pursuit of huge profits," said 29-year-old office worker Marie Fournier.
"All he did was get carried away by that system and take it to extremes. He may well have done us all a service by reminding us what goes on," she said as she took a walk in central Paris during her lunchbreak.
A straw poll taken Monday on the streets of Paris revealed many similar opinions, but as many people who saw 31-year-old Kerviel's activities as simply criminal.
Kerviel was freed on bail later Monday after being placed under formal investigation for "breach of trust", "falsifying and using falsified documents," and "breaching IT procedures."
He escaped more serious fraud charges that could have left him facing up to seven years in prison over the 4.9-billion-euro (7.15-billion-dollar) loss, which nearly wiped out the bank's 2007 profit and left it a potential takeover target.
The junior dealer, the son of a hairdresser, wanted to be an "exceptional trader" and earn a bigger bonus but did not try to profit personally from the unauthorised financial deals, according to a French prosecutor.
The scandal, which broke last week during one of the most turbulent periods for years in global stock markets, is "the symbol of mad money," said the opposition Socialist party's economy spokesman Michel Sapin.
Its eruption in the midst of the biggest plunge in share prices since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and against the wider background of the US subprime housing crisis, has fuelled French wariness of capitalism.
The French Communist Party went as far as comparing Kerviel to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whose dismissal more than a century ago on trumped-up charges of spying triggered a protracted national crisis.
Dominique Moisi of the French Institute of International Relations said Kerviel has become a hero for some because of "the feeling (in France) that the very rich are always getting their way and that relatively modest agents are used as scapegoats."
"But of course this is something you could expect in a country where part of the left and a large section of the population is still anti-globalisation and anti-capitalism," he told AFP.
Globalisation for many French, whose country is the sixth richest in the world due partly to international trade, is all about French factories closing and moving to China.
Opinion polls regularly show that a large section of the French population see the free market as a threat.
Even the political right is wary of what is widely seen here as brutal "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said after the Societe Generale scandal broke that the financial system had "lost sight of its purpose." He denounced operations which can produce "gigantic profits" as well as "gigantic losses" in a few hours.
Kerviel, a seemingly unremarkable young man who has now entered the annals of financial history, has also become a cyberspace star, with a burgeoning cult on the Facebook social networking site and numerous websites dedicated to him.
The "Jerome Kerviel FanClub" group on Facebook had 1,060 members on Monday, while the most popular Facebook site has recruited more than 1,500 members.
All the sites have been flooded with messages, mostly jokey or praising the trader.
"This bloke is my idol! Run, Jerome, run!" said one message.
