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Defense lawyer Olivier Metzner, who had defended former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin in the Clearstream case, said Kerviel is just the victim of a crazy profit-driving trading culture, and of a failed internal risk control system.
He contended that his client's supervisors were aware of what Kerviel was carrying on but did not stop him as long as he was making money for his company. The bank denies that claim.
Metzner also described his client as a gentle boy and a faithful hard working employee motivated by a single desire of "making money for his employer."
To the contrary, Societe Generale's then-chairman Daniel Boutin described Kerviel as a "terrorist and fraudster" who betrayed the confidence of his managers. The bank and his supervisors portrayed him as a "brilliant" trader who eluded sophisticated detection systems.
THINGS BEHIND AN ANTI-HERO
Though Kerviel said he now lives a modest life outside Paris, his peers still remember him as an anti-hero hero against those "fat cats."
While Bank SG alleged that Kerviel had made use of his working experience in the Middle Office to get easy access to the computer system, computer security companies consider him a genius. Right after Kerviel was released in 2009, he was flooded with offers from security system companies.
Last month, Kerviel spoke out in his defense in an autobiography, "L'Engrenage: Memoires d'un trader" ("The Spiral: Memoirs of a Trader"). In his narration, he casts himself as an everyman who got carried away, a scapegoat for the bank and a victim of an out-of-control banking system.
In the tell-all book, he compared his former job to prostitution – with his superiors eagerly counting his days' earnings – and likened that mania to a "great banking orgy."
Abounding questions remain to be cleared. How the low profile Kerviel could manage to cover up his risky trading of 50 billion euros (59.5 billion dollars) for so long while there were 74 different alarms about his activities and queries from the derivatives exchange Eurex? Why did Kerviel take such huge risks while not profiting personally? Was he the sole culprit in the bank's enormous losses?
Up to now, what the scandal exposes is actually beyond the question of a weak internal risk control and security control problem, and beyond a lack of financial regulations in certain risky banking activities.