Kweku Adoboli Freed Early From Prision For Financial Rogue Trading

Ex City trader, Kweku Adoboli lost UBS £1.5bn with illicit trades that he concealed from superiors and was sentenced in November 2012. He was released from Maidstone prison in Kent last week. He had spent almost nine months in custody before trial, so the total time he spent behind bars amounted to close to half his sentence.

The Ghanaian-born British citizen will no longer be allowed to work in finance as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is moving to ensure he cannot take a financial services position up again.

Having graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2003, he joined UBS as a graduate trainee, before becoming a trader in the global synthetic equities division, buying and selling exchange traded funds (ETFs) back in 2006.

He lodged profits in a secret account, which he called the umbrella, and drip-fed them on to the books, but in 2011 market turmoil caused losses that he tried to recover with further unsuccessful bets.

The trial heard that, despite a combined salary and bonus of £360,000, Adoboli was in financial chaos, losing £123,000 in a year on private markets-based spread betting and taking out a series of payday loans to cover the losses.

Since his conviction, he has spent time at the Verne prison on the Isle of Portland in Dorset and later sent to Maidstone, an immigration detention centre in Kent, as well as the low security prison Ford.

Though Adoboli’s losses are the biggest accumulated by a City trader, their impact was not as great as those of Nick Leeson, whose secret trading caused the merchant bank Barings to collapse in 1995.