Nick Leeson
With four other settlement specialists, Leeson was briefly seconded to Hong Kong to troubleshoot Barings' back office in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.[7] Leeson returned to London in September 1991 to investigate a case of fraud in which a Barings employee had used a client's account to trade on a proprietary basis until margin calls from the clearinghouses unraveled the scheme.Prior to leaving, Leeson was denied a broker's licence in the UK because of committing fraud on his application, having failed to report a judgment against him entered by the National Westminster Bank.[13][14] He later stated that this account was first used to hide an error made by a subordinate who had been assigned to buy twenty futures contracts for Fuji Bank but sold them instead, costing Barings £20,000.Leeson believes that he first crossed into out-and-out criminal conduct when he forgot to reconcile a discrepancy of 500 contracts, costing Barings US$1.7 million.As the losses grew higher, Leeson fabricated cover stories to explain why he needed more cash from London; his sterling reputation protected him from close scrutiny.The Great Hanshin earthquake hit early in the morning on 17 January, sending Asian markets, and Leeson's trading positions, downward.[22] Leeson was released in July 1999 after serving at least two-thirds of his sentence (4 years and 4 months) for good behaviour, and having been diagnosed with colon cancer, which he survived despite grim forecasts.A review in the financial columns of The New York Times stated, "This is a dreary book, written by a young man very taken with himself, but it ought to be read by banking managers and auditors everywhere.The events also form the subject matter of a 1996 television documentary made by Adam Curtis, titled Inside Story Special: £830,000,000 – Nick Leeson and the Fall of the House of Barings.[28] In March 2023, Leeson joined Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit, a corporate intelligence firm run by former Black Cube operative Seth Freedman, and turned into an investigator of financial misconduct cases.