Jérôme Kerviel Mayor of Pont l'Abbé, Kerviel stood for a seat on the local council with the Union for a Popular Movement party but was not elected. Kerviel joined the middle office of the bank Société Générale in the summer of 2000, working in its compliance department. In 2005 he was promoted to the bank's Delta One products team in Paris where he was a junior trader. Société Générale's Delta One business includes program trading, exchange-traded funds, swaps, index futures and quantitative trading. Christian Noyer, governor of the Bank of France, has described Kerviel as a "computer genius"; however, sources within Société
2008 Société Générale trading loss told them his actions were also practiced by other traders in the company. Kerviel admits to exceeding his credit limits, but claims he was working to increase bank profits. He told authorities that the bank was happy with his previous year's performance, and was expecting to be paid a €300,000 bonus. Family members speaking out say the bank is using Kerviel as a scapegoat to excuse its recent heavy losses. 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