A sign outside the Societe Generale office building in central Paris, France, Monday, February 5, 2024.
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predecessor Societe Generale A trader sacked over unauthorized high-risk bets has lambasted French banks for making him a “scapegoat” and failing to accept responsibility for missed trades.
Kavish Kataria, who was fired from the bank’s Delta One unit last year, said he reported profits and losses on his trades to his team in Hong Kong and superiors at the Paris headquarters every day, while receiving a daily e-mail Emails with information about the transaction are also sent.
“Instead of taking responsibility for their risk system failures and identifying trades at the right time, they fired me and terminated my contract,” Kataria said on LinkedIn. postal Thursday.
Societe Generale’s comments come after Societe Generale confirmed earlier this week that Kataria and team leader Kevin Wu were fired last year following an internal review of the deal. A spokesman for Société Générale declined to comment for this article but issued a statement about the two men’s dismissals.
“Our rigorous control framework allowed us to identify a one-off trading event in 2023 that had no impact and take appropriate remedial action,” the statement read.
While Société Générale did not lose any money from the trades, losses could surge into hundreds of millions of dollars if the market were to tank, a person familiar with the matter said. told the Financial Times.
The person said Kataria had been trading options on the Indian index but he was not allowed to do so. However, as most were day trades, they were not immediately detected, according to the Financial Times.
Kataria said the deals were automatically booked and “an email was sent to the entire team every day mentioning that the deals had been reconciled.”
“It would be easy for others to say we didn’t know about the deal I made,” he wrote. “That means either you’re not doing your job or you’re not qualified to do the same job.”
Kataria joined the bank in Hong Kong in 2021 and claims he made $50 million for the unit in the past eight months alone.
He posted on LinkedIn calling for greater supervision because he was fired and only received seven days’ pay, and his bonus from the previous year was withheld.
“The trade industry is so big but there are no rules or regulations to get justice for traders,” he said.
Risk management is a key area of focus for the bank, with Societe Generale still scarred by the 4.9 billion euros ($5.2 billion) losses suffered by “rogue trader” Jerome Kerviel in 2008, who was involved in the Talia works in the same derivatives sector.
The French bank reported on Friday that first-quarter net profit fell 22%, missing expectations, as profits from equity derivatives sales offset weakness in retail banking and fixed-income trading.
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