There is much to read in 71 pages of the Mission Green Summary Report, and there are apparently a number of other documents that provide details. In a June 20, 2008 post by Patrick O’Brien entitled “Behind the Scenes at Societe Generale – Rogue Trader” on the OpenPages blog, he refers to an audit report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which he claims describes a flawed “general environment” at SocGen. The SocGen Special Committee, in item 14 of their introduction to the February 20 report, stated that the PwC report “will be given to the Board of Directors and will be made public prior to the Annual General Meeting.”
Those who are interested can keep busy studying this case for months with the information that is already available and, if you get done with that, there will be the inevitable books published, which will reinterpret the “facts” yet again. After all, Kerviel was immediately offered a job by a security consulting firm and likely has signed or will sign a lucrative book deal (shades of Kevin Mitnick?).
There is a tremendous amount to be learned from the current and future post-mortems of the SocGen incident. I am sure that governance and controls in trading areas have been significantly enhanced as a result. It appears that SocGen has indeed been fortunate to see itself through this hit. Barings and Kidder Peabody, for example, were not able to survive similar incidents.
Perhaps the biggest lesson learned here is that, despite precedent, financial and other institutions will eventually forget about this incident and, when good times return, some are destined to repeat the same mistakes that severely damaged or brought down their predecessors.
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