More than 200,000 British savers face a fight for their money after a bank collapsed
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World's biggest banking disasters
Evening Standard24.01.08
• France's second biggest bank, Société Générale, reveals what it described as an "exceptional" fraud by a junior trader totalling 4.9 billion euros (£3.7 billion).
It said that, during last year and this, a futures trader misled investors through a "scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions".
The trader made bets on how the European share market would move, known as futures.
• Barings Bank, one of Britain's oldest, collapsed in 1995 after Nick Leeson, the original rogue trader, lost £860 million while betting on the future of the Tokyo stock market.
He fled and was arrested in Frankfurt, then extradited and jailed. After serving more than three years he was released and is now chief executive of an Irish football club.
• In 2002 John Rusnak, a currency trader at US bank Allfirst, based in Baltimore, Maryland, and then a subsidy of Allied Irish Bank, pleaded guilty to fraud amounting to $691 million (£345 million).
The following year he was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison after doing a deal with prosecutors.
• Toshihide Iguchi, a former car dealer, lost more than $1 billion (£500 million) at Japanese bank Daiwa, in fraudulent trading over 11 years from 1984 onwards. He claimed losses spiralled after he tried to cover up his initial bad bets.
• In 1991 the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), was seized by regulators after auditors reported huge losses from illegal loans to corporate insiders and traders.
The bank collapsed with debts of more than $16 billion (£8 billion) and about 250,000 savers lost money.
At its height the bank operated in 78 countries and claimed assets of $25 billion (£12.5 billion).
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