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.


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Pakistan flood recovery could take years

enjoy Pakistan flood recovery could take years




Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari warned his beleaguered nation could take years to recover from devastating floods as global pledges topped 700 million dollars and waters refused to relent.
The near month-long floods have killed 1,500 people and affected up to 20 million nationwide in the country’s worst ever natural disaster, with the threat of disease ever present in the camps sheltering desperate survivors.
“Your guess is as good as mine, but three years is a minimum,” Zardari told reporters on Monday when asked how long it would take Pakistan to go through relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation after the floods.
“I don’t think Pakistan will ever fully recover but we will move on,” the president said, adding the government — under fire for its slow relief response — was working to protect people from similar disasters in future.
Senior US official Dan Feldman, the deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington that a UN General Assembly meeting last week was “a real galvanising moment” in the aid effort.
“By our count, we’ve seen over 700 million dollars pledged, including our own 150 million dollar commitment, from over 30 countries,” Feldman said, without giving a country-by-country breakdown.
He said there are an “additional 300 million dollars in as yet undefined commitments” from a variety of countries.
The United States has made nuclear-armed Pakistan a key ally in the fight against Islamic extremism with fears militancy could benefit from the instability after the flooding and fury at the government.
Zardari was strongly criticised for failing to cut short a visit to Europe at the start of the disaster and while he defended that decision, he acknowledged that some criticism of the government’s response was justified.
“There will always be a ‘could have been better, would have been better, should have been better’... (but) you have to understand how enormous the issue (the scale of the disaster) is,” he said.
Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from flood-threatened areas in the south since Saturday, including most of the 100,000 residents in the city of Shahdadkot, which authorities were battling to protect.
Dozens of villages around Shahdadkot were inundated, district administration official Yasin Shar told AFP Monday, as floodwaters threatened the city.
Nearly 90 percent of people living in the area had left and the remaining were being rushed out, he said.
Similar efforts were being made to save Hyderabad, a city of 2.5 million people on the lower reaches of the Indus river, where at least 36 surrounding villages have been swept away.
Pakistani officials on Monday began talks with the International Monetary Fund in Washington amid reports Islamabad was asking the fund to ease the terms of a loan worth nearly 11 billion dollars.
Last week Pakistani officials said Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh would ask the IMF to restructure the current loan or consider new financing.
There are fears that losses as a result of the floods could reach 43 billion dollars.
Millions of survivors are in desperate need of food, shelter and clean drinking water and require humanitarian assistance to survive, as concerns grow over potential cholera, typhoid and hepatitis outbreaks.
Disaster management officials say that the scale of the flooding is much larger than Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake, which killed 73,000 people and made 3.3 million homeless.
Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Islamabad, said that 1.5 million people were being treated for everything from respiratory and skin infections to diarrhoea
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