Watch French trader gets 3 years in jail, must pay $6.7B

French trader gets 3 years in jail, must pay $6.7B


PARIS - Ex-trader Jerome Kerviel, speaking for the first time Wednesday about his tough sentencing in history's biggest rogue trading scandal, insisted he is a scapegoat for his former bank and compared the penalty to getting "hit on the head with a club."
The 33-year-old was convicted Tuesday, sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay his former employer damages of euro4.9 billion ($6.7 billion) - the equivalent of 20 Airbus A380 superjumbo jets.
"I'm starting to digest it, but I'm nonetheless crushed by the weight of the sanction and the weight of responsibility the ruling places on me," Kerviel told Europe-1 radio.
Kerviel maintained in court that the bank and his bosses tolerated his massive risk-taking as long as it made money - a claim the bank strongly denied, saying he took great pains to cover up his actions.
"I have the feeling they wanted to make me pay for everybody and that Societe Generale had to be saved," he said.
Of the verdict, he said: "It's difficult, obviously, when you get hit on the head with a club that way."
Kerviel is appealing the ruling and says he hopes in the new trial "to prove once and for all that I wasn't the only one in the boat."
The bank says Kerviel made bets of up to euro50 billion - more than the bank's total market value - on futures contracts on three European equity indices, and that he masked the size of his bets by recording fictitious offsetting transactions.
The euro4.9 billion figure is the sum the bank says it lost unwinding Kerviel's complex positions in January 2008. It's a sum nobody realistically expects him to repay.
Kerviel said he is currently making about euro900 ($1,245) a month working part-time as a computer consultant - he reduced his hours to concentrate on the trial.


Read more: http://www.kansas.com/2010/10/05/1527452/french-trader-gets-3-years-in.html#ixzz11ZgbiEDw
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Watches this 'Jarhead' bear gets out of a jam in Florida

The cub was in a life-threatening situation because it could not eat or drink
We are saw this new image enjoy 'Jarhead' bear gets out of a jam in Florida
A bear cub in Florida, which had a plastic jar stuck on its head for at least 10 days, has now been freed.

The cub, affectionately nicknamed "Jarhead", got its head stuck in the container while rooting through rubbish around the town of Weirsdale.

The cub was days away from death as he had not been able to eat or drink, biologists who rescued the bear said.

They sedated the mother bear before grabbing the cub, pinning his ears back and prising off the container.

Residents began calling the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) at the end of July to report sightings of the bear cub with his head stuck in a jar.

The cub, his mother and two siblings regularly foraged in the bins around Weirsdale.

'Tough little bear'
Biologists set traps in different areas, but the wary bears kept clear.

After eight days of sightings, two days went by without any reports of the bear family, and the scientists feared the cub could have starved to death.

But on Friday, the bears returned.

The FWC team, including a specialist bear-response agent, went to the scene.

They shot the mother with a tranquiliser dart before wrestling Jarhead to the ground long enough to get the plastic container off his head.

"But the tough little bear lived up to its US Marine moniker and did not give up without a fight," the FWC said on its website.

The scientists then placed the sleeping mother in a trap, where the three cubs eventually joined her.

After a day under observation in the trap, the bear family were released and have not been seen since - a result the FWC describes as "good news indeed".

"Although the story appears to have a happy ending, it truly illustrates one of the worst things that can happen when wildlife gets into garbage," the FWC said.
Coppied by http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10977657