Trial of Jérôme Kerviel the rogue trader

Jérôme Kerviel would like us to believe he is a "Mister Nobody"; a modest player caught up in the global banking orgy.

To Société Générale, the historic bank he almost brought to its knees, Kerviel is a rogue trader, a master criminal and a financial "terrorist".

The anti-capitalist Left sees Kerviel as an iconoclast, a working-class hero and nemesis of greedy banks and their fat-cat staff.

And the rest of the French population is undecided over whether Kerviel personifies David in the battle against Goliath or everything rotten about so-called "Anglo-Saxon" banking practices. Add to all this his unfortunate role as the harbinger of the worldwide financial meltdown that came months after his arrest, and one is left wondering who is the real Jérôme Kerviel: a mediocre backroom boy or, as the Bank of France Governor Christian Noyer would have him, "a genius of fraud"?

This afternoon at the Palais de Justice court in Paris, three judges will begin the long and complicated legal process aimed at not only answering that question but also lifting a stone and peering into the muddy world of futures, options and other obscurities of the international money market.

The 33-year-old former trader faces charges of breach of trust, computer hacking and falsification of records leading to Société Générale, known as SocGen, losing 4.9 billion (£4 billion).

Kerviel has admitted taking "excessive risks" but insists that his bosses knew what he was doing. He claims they supported him while he was winning but made him a scapegoat when the risky deals became known.

"I was wrong and committed errors, faults even, but I was serious and efficient at work and the fact that my bosses protected me and I was promoted during my short career shows this," he says. "What's more, I never stole a single centime."

His trial in the Salle des Criées — the largest courtroom in the Palais — is expected to last three weeks. It will hear from 50 witnesses, feature some of France's most celebrated lawyers and be attended, at the start, by nearly 200 journalists. Dozens more have been told they will have to remain outside.

It will be the first time many have seen the darkly handsome Mr Kerviel in the flesh, though most will recognise the former trader from the serious-looking — sullen even — photograph that was wired around the globe after his arrest.

Over the past two years he has remained out of the spotlight working as a consultant for a technology company, only resurfacing three weeks ago to publish his own account of what is known as l'Affair Jérôme Kerviel.

In The Spiral: Memories of a Trader, Kerviel gives his self-portrait, that of an ordinary man caught up in events beyond his control.

He describes an unremarkable upbringing in the sleepy Breton town of Pont-L'Abbé — population 8,000 — where his mother ran a hairdressing salon and his father was a metalwork teacher.

Young Kerviel was a quiet, gentle boy who tried to pass unnoticed and who enjoyed a "harmonious and happy" childhood, according to psychological reports to be presented to the court.

These describe a young man who is "balanced emotionally, intellectually and in his social relations" and boasts an "above average intellectual potential".

At the family dinner table Jérôme and his older brother Olivier had what he describes as "easy and harmonious" discussions about the news, the economy and the world of finance.

After passing his baccalauréat, he studied economics and finance at university, gaining a master's degree, before fulfilling his childhood dream of working in a bank by joining SocGen in the summer of 2000. His first job was as a "middle office" assistant in the compliance department, where he became familiar with SocGen's computer system for checking on traders' activities.

In 2005 he was promoted to trader, an ambition he thought was destined to forever elude him especially as a senior colleague had previously declared: "You'll never make a trader. You haven't the training or the character."

Unfortunately, this cruel analysis was to be more prescient than either man could have imagined.

From the beginning the new trader was an unlikely financial whizz-kid. Unlike the other trader golden boys, he did not boast a flash car or expensive jewellery and lived in a relatively modest flat — albeit in the upmarket Paris suburb of Neuilly — furnished from Ikea.

In marked contrast to the enormous bonuses paid to City traders across the Channel, Kerviel's salary was modest, around 100,000 (£83,000) including bonuses.

French newspapers have commented on his humble upbringing, suggesting he may have suffered an inferiority complex with regard to his colleagues, many of them upper-middle-class graduates from France's prestigious Grandes Ecoles.

Kerviel denies this but describes how he did not enjoy the arrogance of his fellow traders or the childish, sometimes vulgar banter in which they indulged despite their "bourgeois" backgrounds.

He claims he was devoted to his job, sacrificing his personal life for a 15-hour day, and his hobbies — judo and jogging — for cigarettes and stress. In the 268-page book, which has sold around 20,000 copies in the past month, Kerviel says he had only "one passion in my life: my work" but upholds his own modest opinion of himself and his colleagues.

"At the heart of the great banking orgy, traders are only given the same consideration as any street prostitute: a quick thank you for a good day's takings," he writes.

Despite his initial caution, he appeared to thrive on the competitive, adrenaline-fuelled trading floor, making steadily growing profits. In 2007, he says, he declared 55 million — though records show he actually made three times this amount. Although this was well above his colleagues' results he says his superiors raised no questions and told him he would receive a 300,000 bonus, half of what he expected.

Most of the millions were made through speculative deals of exorbitant sums of money that far exceeded his trading limits but which he claims were tolerated as long as they turned a profit.

"The passiveness (of my superiors) pushed me to continue I was caught up in a spiral in which I was trapped and couldn't escape," he later told police.

With multi-million euro deals done at the click of a computer mouse there was little time for reflection, though he admits to a twinge of conscience after making 500,000 when the London Stock Exchange dipped following the bomb attacks on July 7, 2005. "That morning my happiness at making such a profit fought with the growing uneasiness of having more or less earned the bank a fortune thanks to the misfortune of others," he writes.

But in January 2008, Kerviel's complex web of hidden deals began to unravel when SocGen discovered he was trading in around 50 billion, more than 10 billion above the bank's market value.

When the extent of SocGen's exposure to risk emerged, bank chiefs ordered him back from a romantic weekend break in Deauville with his girlfriend for questioning. The following week he was arrested.

In the rush to limit its losses, the bank suspended Kerviel and took over his portfolio, losing a total of 4.9 billion.

The subsequent two-year investigation showed Kerviel was able to use his knowledge of SocGen's computer system to conceal some of his speculative trades by offsetting them against less risky fictional deals. SocGen was given a record fine by the French banking regulator for failures in its controls but has vehemently denied knowing about the unauthorised dealing.

Today Kerviel will try to convince the judges that he is a naïve Mister Nobody who fell into the clutches of an infernal banking system. The former trader believes his trial will reveal the global mire in which he says all dealing rooms wallow: "anything is allowed to get good results.

"In a trading room the ideal modus operandi can be summed up in one phrase: knowing how to take the maximum risk to gain the bank the maximum money," he writes. "In the name of such a rule, the most elementary principles of caution don't count for much."

He adds: "I believed I was invulnerable and I was because I was making the bank money in short, everything I was able to do was made possible by a form of complicity by laissez-faire."

On the other side of the court Société Générale will attempt to portray a very different picture: that of Jérôme Kerviel, the master manipulator.

Jean Reinhard, one of the bank's lawyers, says: "He feels neither remorse nor guilt. Nothing. Not even for the colleagues with whom he worked. His feelings are superficial."