French rogue trader’s jail sentence upheld

A top French appeals court has upheld rogue trader Jerome Kerviel’s three-year jail sentence over high-risk trading that cost the Societe Generale bank $7bn.

But the court cancelled the $6.8bn in damages that Kerviel had been ordered to pay, and referred this part of the former trader’s sentence to another court near Paris to be rejudged.

Kerviel’s lawyer Patrice Spinosi had argued in February, while appealing the conviction for breach of trust, that France’s second-largest bank by market value, had committed “wilful misconduct” and was aware of his client’s high-risk trading.

Kerviel was sentenced to three years in prison in October 2010 for breach of trust, forgery and entering false data for unauthorised deals that threatened to bankrupt the bank, one of the biggest in Europe.