Few stories have grabbed the world's headlines quite like the
collapse of Barings merchant bank in late February 1995.
Trusted with the finances of royalty and aristocracy for over
two hundred years, Barings had apparently been brought down
by the covert trading activites of just one man, leaving the
bank with losses of around £850 million.
The fate of Nick Leeson is now well known. But, until the publication
of Rogue Trader, Leeson's role in the affair had been
shrouded in rumour and speculation. The story he has to tell
surpasses the feats of imagination of the most creative novelist:
the candid, compelling and true confession of a pure gamber
who found himself sucked into a spiral of terrifying loss.
Rogue Trader takes us from Nick Leeson's humble beginnings
as a Watford plasterer's son to the very heart of the cut-and-thrust
empire he made his own: SIMEX, the Singapore money market that
witnessed both Nick's phenomenal rise to prominence and devastating
chaos in one of the most stressful jobs in the world, showing
us the frenetic culture of the trading pit revealing not only
he forces that led him to use the infamous 88888 account, but
also the ways in which he dealt with the losses, avoided detection,
and participated in the near-farcical endgame which sparked
the most extraordinary news story in recent times. The world
marvelled as he and his then-wife Lisa (who until then has known
nothing of the losses) made their escape as the bank collapsed
around them, only to return to acknowledge the results of Nick's
activities and face their onerous consequences.
Pressure, pace, error: Nick reveals in breathtaking style
the inside story of this amazing chain of events. Crackling
with dialogue and characters, in a narrative as crisp as any
thriller, Rogue Trader is the best-seller and hugely compelling
account of a man shaped by events that proved beyond this control.
