He Overcame Cancer and the Collapse of His Marriage to Build a New Life. But Nick Leeson Will Always Be the Rogue Trader Who Brought Down a Bank
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Summary
ONE of the grating things about infamy is that it makes you all things to all people. The man sitting opposite me in a Galway hotel is used to being approached by backslapping East End geezers with chunky gold jewellery, "giving it large" and wanting to swap self- aggrandising prison stories. He's used to snide comments from the captains of industry he runs into on the after-dinner speaking circuit. But some side-effects of his notoriety still floor him.
"I was giving a lecture at Leeds University once and some guy, who I think had been asleep, just stood up and said: 'What's it like to be an anarchist icon?' I said, 'What the f*** have you been listening to for the last 40 minutes? I. Didn't. Mean. To. Do it!'" The speaker is Nick Leeson. The "it" in question is the collapse of Baring Brothers, one of the world's oldest financial institutions, brought to its knees by an unauthorised pounds-860 million debt Leeson racked up in the Japanese futures market in the mid1990s. When he was discovered, he went on the run before being arrested in Frankfurt and hauled halfway across the world to spend four-and-a- half years in a Singapore prison. His wife left him and he was diagnosed with cancer of the colon. He survived both setbacks.See the full content of this document
Extract
He Overcame Cancer and the Collapse of His Marriage to Build a New Life. But Nick Leeson Will Always Be the Rogue Trader Who Brought Down a Bank
Out of all this came one book, one film (both called Rogue Trader; the latter starred Ewan McGregor as Leeson) and many jokes. Here's just one of them. When Nick Leeson writes a cheque, it's the bank that bounces.
Now 38, the infamous Leeson currently lives in Galway with his second wife, his two step-children and his 10-month-old son, Mackensey. It's in Galway that we meet, in the bar of a hotel on the outskirts of the city.He was the most unemployable person in the world when he left...See the full content of this document
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