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
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