Jérôme Kerviel bank a profit of US$2 billion as of 2007. Managers for Société Générale have described some of the means Kerviel employed to avoid the bank's internal controls and escape detection. Its Executive Chairman Daniel Bouton describes the pattern as like "a mutating virus" in which hundreds of thousands of trades were hidden behind offsetting faked hedge trades. Officials say Kerviel was careful to close the trades in just two or three days, just before the trades' timed controls would trigger notice from the bank's internal control system, and Kerviel would then shift those older positions to newly initiated trades. City
Seat of the European Parliament in Strasbourg and the 1950s buildings of the Strasbourg fair, some of which had to be torn down to make way for the "Immeuble du Parlement européen 4", its formal name. Built at a cost of 3.1 billion French francs (470 million euros) at the intersection of the Ill and the Marne-Rhine Canal, it houses the hemicycle for plenary sessions, the largest of any European institution (750 seats – expanded to 785 – for MEPs and 680 for visitors), 18 other assembly rooms as well as a total of 1,133 parliamentary offices. Through a covered footbridge over the Ill, the Louise Weiss