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
Société Générale was at the centre of a financial scandal in 2009. The bank denied those accusations. January 2008: Trading loss incident (Kerviel Fraud) On January 24, 2008, the bank announced that a single futures trader at the bank had fraudulently lost the bank €4.9 billion (an equivalent of US$7.2 billion), the largest such loss in history. The company did not name the trader, but other sources identified him as Jérôme Kerviel, a relatively junior futures trader who allegedly orchestrated a series of bogus transactions that spiraled out of control amid turbulent markets in 2007 and early 2008. Partly due to the