The logo appears outside the Societe Generale SA office building in central Paris, France, on Monday, February 5, 2024.
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Former Societe Generale A trader sacked for making unauthorized risky bets has criticized the French bank for making him a “scapegoat” and failing to take its share of responsibility for missed trades.
Kavish Kataria, who was sacked from Delta One last year, said profits and losses on his trades were reported daily to his team bosses in Hong Kong as well as at the head office in Paris, while daily emails on trades also was sent out.
“Instead of taking responsibility for the failure of their risk system and not identifying trades at the right time, they fired me and terminated my contract,” Kataria said on LinkedIn. mail Thursday.
The comments come after SocGen confirmed earlier this week that Kataria and team boss Kevin Ng were sacked last year following an internal review of their transactions. A SocGen representative declined to comment on the publication, but issued a statement regarding the couple’s dismissal.
“Our rigorous monitoring system allowed us to identify a single trading incident in 2023 that had no impact and resulted in appropriate corrective action being taken,” the statement said.
While SocGen did not lose any money in the trade, losses could rise to hundreds of millions of dollars if there were a market downturn, a person familiar with the matter. told FT.
According to this person, Kataria was trading options on Indian indices, which he was not allowed to do. However, as most of them were day trading, they were not immediately detected, the FT reported.
Kataria said trades were booked automatically and “a daily email was sent to the entire group mentioning that trades had been agreed upon.”
“It is very easy for other people to say that we did not know about the transactions I made,” he wrote. “It means either you didn’t do your job properly or you were unfit for it.”
Kataria joined the bank in Hong Kong in 2021 and said it made $50 million from the branch in the last eight months alone.
In a post on LinkedIn, he called for better regulation after he was fired on seven days’ pay and had his bonus for the previous year withheld.
“The trade industry is so big, but there are no rules or regulations that protect trade fairness,” he said.
Risk management is a critical area of focus for banks, and SocGen remains reeling from a €4.9 billion ($5.2 billion) loss suffered in 2008 by “rogue trader” Jerome Kerviel, who worked in the same derivatives department as and Kataria.
The French bank on Friday reported a smaller-than-expected 22% drop in first-quarter net profit as gains from equity derivatives sales offset weakness in its retail banking and fixed-income trading.