Financial French farce stars a sardine led by donkeys

In the financial world, if you do not understand what someone is saying, the fault probably lies with them and not with you. The case of Jerome Kerviel, the disgraced Societe Generale trader, is a classic example of this, not just because he speaks French. It was another Frenchman who puzzled us all a few years ago with a gnomic utterance and that time he was speaking in English. "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea."

At those immortal and incomprehensible words of Eric Cantona, once football's "King of Old Trafford", the Anglo-Saxon world has pondered and shaken its head. What on earth could he talking about? We all thought he was a one-off and that we would never look on his like again - but one of the few participants who took the side of Jerome Kerviel uttered something in a similar vein. A certain Benoit Tailleu, a fellow trader, went into the witness box and pronounced: "It's as if Jerome Kerviel had a mandate to buy 10 tonnes of strawberries but bought 100 tonnes of potatoes and the supervisor passes through the hangar every day and says nothing."

One suspects that this sort of oblique comment is taught at the Lycee, one of the reasons that convinced me to take my children out of French school. I could tell that any day soon I would ask them where the remote control for the television was and they would respond, "When the seagull follows the trawler, it looks for a sack of strawberries," when the correct answer would be more like, "under the sofa".

But whichever way you look at it, to borrow King Eric's phraseology, it does look like poor old Jerome has been thrown into the sea like a sardine. His sorry tale has been told repeatedly this week but for anyone who hasn't been paying attention, young Jerome, a modest man with apparently much to be modest about, the son of a Breton metalworker and a hairdresser, joined snooty Societe Generale in his 20s.

He made such little impact on his co-workers that they nicknamed him "Monsieur Personne", or Mr Nobody. It is always a mistake to overlook a Breton. They have their own language and are rather like the Cornish of France, although somewhat inexplicably the pasty does not feature in their cuisine. It is not documented what Monsieur Kerviel ate for lunch. It is possible that he failed to take the obligatory two hours and three courses beloved by proper Frenchmen, which is probably why he got into such a mess. For at one point he had wagered €50 billion (Dh256.5bn) of the bank's capital on a complex series of events.

The defence of Daniel Bouton, then the chief executive of Societe Generale and a man who was clearly not on the "bouton", was that Kerviel was a rogue trader, a "financial terrorist". In this sense, Kerviel resembles Nick Leeson, the former Singapore-based trader for Barings Bank, once one of the grandest names in the city of London. Mr Leeson produced marvellous results and profits for his bosses in London, who paid him £50,000 plus a bonus of £130,000 in 1992. The bank made £10 million from his efforts and no doubt the blue-blooded chiefs trousered hefty bonuses from his efforts.

Like Kerviel, Mr Leeson had come from the edge of society with something to prove. In his case it was Watford, a rather nasty town close to the M25. Elton John, then known as Reg Dwight, bought the football club, but he at least can sing. Mr Leeson invented a phoney client when things started to go wrong - a technique Kerviel copied. Then the pressure got to Mr Leeson, who left a note saying simply, "I'm sorry" and fled Singapore. After a Keystone Cops-style chase through Malaysia, Thailand and Germany - why Germany? - he was finally collared and charged. Barings went bust.

Of course, it is always convenient for managers to blame their underlings when things go wrong and they certainly never apologise. There is clearly an element of the outsider in the story of Kerviel, Nick Leeson and other rogue traders who have popped up in the past. But I would have thought that if I were running a bank, I would want to know exactly what my exposure was on a daily basis to every situation. That Kerviel was able to risk €50bn is a damning indictment of the management of Societe Generale.

Equally surprising is that he only earned €100,000 a year "in a good year". I guess it was this roguish element that Monsieur Bouton was referring to. Not so much roguish as foolish, I would have thought. Now contemplating three years in jail, Kerviel has been surprisingly restrained in his comments, although he did say he thought " soldier Kerviel had been shot to save the general". It is well known that soldiers will come up with any old claptrap in the heat of battle to save themselves and their comrades.

But it is the job of the generals to decipher the messages, keep a cool head and sort the sardines from the trawlers, whether they are in sacks of strawberries or potatoes.

rwright@thenational.ae