Two days before his 28th birthday Nicholas William Lesson went missing from Singapore on his desk he left a hurriedly scribbled not saying "I'm Sorry." He guessed he would be jailed for the fraud and in the hope of being locked up in the UK rather than the Far East; the couple went on the run. He went first to an exclusive resort in Borneo, and then to Frankfurt. The worlds most wanted man on the cover of every newspaper checked in on his flight to Europe using his own name and hiding beneath a baseball cap. The German authorities were alerted and the Police were there to greet Leeson as he touched down. On the news of Leesons arrest cheers erupted in the worlds futures markets.

In his wake he had wiped out the 233 year old Baring investment Bank, who proudly counted HM The Queen as a client. The $1.3 billion dollars of liabilities he had run up was more than the entire capital and reserves of the bank. Investors saw their savings wiped out, and some 1,200 of Leeson's fellow employees lost their Jobs. Dutch bank ING agreed to assume nearly all of Barings' debt and acquired the bank for the princely sum of £1.

Who was to blame? Leeson definitely. He pleaded guilty to forging documents and misleading SIMEX, but as the dust settled from the Barrings collapse, the famous line from the Watergate prosecution was asked; "What did the President know, and when did he know it?' Although there is no doubt about Leesons deeds, could senior bank officials not have known of the rogue trader's actions? The Bank of England in its report concluded, that the hot shot trader had acted alone managing to pull the wool over his superiors eyes until it was too late to save the bank. It was certainly a fact that most of the old school really never understood or cared to master the complexities of derivatives trading.

But Barings could not totally escape blame, an internal memo dated in 1993 had warned the London headquarters about allowing Leeson to be both trader and settlement officer "We are in danger of setting up a system that will prove disastrous." Nothing was done. In January 1995 SIMEX expressed concern to the bank about Leesons dealings, but to no avail as the bank still wired him $1 billon to continue his trading. A report by the Singapore authorities into the collapse regards with disbelief, the protestations by Leeson's superiors, all of who were forced to resign, that they knew nothing of error account 88888.

After his arrest in Germany he spent a few fraught months trying to escape extradition to Singapore. He failed and in December 1995 a court in Singapore sentenced him to six and a half years after pleading guilty to two counts of deceiving the bank's auditors and of cheating the Singapore exchange. Having served nearly nine months in Germany awaiting extradition, his sentence was backdated to March 2, 1995. In jail, he is said to have exercised vigorously, ‘found God’ and spent his days pacing away the time.

The fortunes of Leeson's personal life also seemed to mirror the peaks and troughs of his career. Lisa his wife got a job as an airhostess to be able to visit him regularly. She even helped him write his book, Rogue Trader. Their marriage at first survived the strain of being apart. But what Lisa could not abide were his revelations of his infidelity with Geisha girls, and she divorced him. Her remarriage — to another City trader served to further knock his spirit and he grew very depressed at losing his once-devoted wife.

Within months, Leeson was diagnosed as suffering from cancer of the colon, the disease that had killed his mother when he was only 20. From being a partying, good-time youngster who could abuse his body with heavy drinking, he was reduced to a ghost of a man. His weight plummeted and most of his hair fell out from chemotherapy. His father, a plasterer, has myeloma, diagnosed after Nick himself fell ill.

Prison itself was not exactly kind to the immune system; it was a hard existence, Nick being locked up with two others in a tiny cell 23 hours out of 24. Cellmates belonged to rival gangs, and when fights broke out you inevitably got drawn in. Nick slept on the rough concrete floor; breakfast was three slices of bread and the other meals, monotonous rice with a bit of chicken or vegetables. The worst period — worse even than cancer, Nick insists — was the seven months between March and October 1996, when Lisa's visits and daily letters dried up: "In prison you really need something to hang on to. That something was my relationship until suddenly I didn't know what was going on between Lisa and me. Eventually I wrote offering a divorce and after two weeks she replied, saying yes."

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