Jérôme Kerviel SocGen's stance in his case, Kerviel met with Pope Francis outside the Vatican on 19 February 2014, and undertook a pilgrimage from Rome to Paris against the "tyranny of the markets". On 8 September 2014, Kerviel was released from Fleury Merogis prison, having served less than five months of detention. He was to begin a job with an IT consultancy firm. Jérôme Kerviel Jérôme Kerviel (; born 1977) is a French trader who was convicted in the 2008 Société Générale trading loss for breach of trust, forgery and unauthorized use of the bank's computers, resulting in losses valued at €4.9
Jérôme Kerviel Générale described Kerviel as "not a star". Kerviel earned a bonus of €60,000 on top of a €74,000 salary in 2006, considered modest in terms of the salaries paid to traders in the financial markets. He had hoped for a €600,000 bonus for 2007 and would have received at least half that amount. The bank states that Kerviel was assigned to arbitrage discrepancies between equity derivatives and cash equity prices, and "began creating the fictitious trades in late 2006 and early 2007, but that these transactions were relatively small. The fake trading increased in frequency, and in size". Bank officials