Nicholas William Leeson was born on 25 February 1967 and is an English former derivatives trader whose fraudulent, unauthorised and speculative trades resulted in the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank, the United Kingdom's oldest existing merchant bank.
30 Facts About Nick Leeson
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Nick Leeson was convicted of financial crime in a Singapore court and served over four years in Changi Prison.
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Between 2005 and 2011, Nick Leeson had senior management roles at League of Ireland football club Galway United.
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Nick Leeson is active on the keynote and after-dinner speaking circuit, where he advises companies about risk and corporate responsibility.
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Nick Leeson was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, to working-class parents on a council estate.
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Nick Leeson's father was a self-employed plasterer, his mother a nurse.
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In 1987, Nick Leeson moved to Morgan Stanley's Futures and Options back office, clearing and settling listed derivatives transactions.
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Nick Leeson returned to London in September 1991 to investigate a case of fraud in which a Barings employee had used a client's account to trade on a proprietary basis until margin calls from the clearinghouses unraveled the scheme.
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Barings had held a seat on SIMEX for some time but did not activate it until Nick Leeson, appointed general manager, was sent to head both front office and back office operations.
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Nick Leeson used one of Barings' error accounts to hide his losses.
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Nick Leeson used this error account to cover further bad trades by himself and others.
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Nick Leeson believes that he first crossed into out-and-out criminal conduct when he forgot to reconcile a discrepancy of 500 contracts, costing Barings US$1.7 million.
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Nick Leeson concluded that the only way to hide such a massive error and keep his job was to hide it in the error account.
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Nick Leeson insists that he never used the account for his own gain, but in 1996 investigators had located approximately $35 million in various bank accounts tied to him.
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Nick Leeson had followed a "doubling" strategy: every time he lost money, he would bet double the amount that was lost to recoup the amount.
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Nick Leeson had to maintain his reputation as a trading genius and soon found himself hiding his losses there again.
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The beginning of the end occurred on 16 January 1995, when Nick Leeson placed a short straddle in the Singapore and Tokyo stock exchanges, essentially betting that the Japanese stock market would not move significantly overnight.
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Nick Leeson attempted to recoup his losses by making a series of increasingly risky new trades, this time betting that the Nikkei Stock Average would make a rapid recovery.
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Nick Leeson pleaded guilty to two counts of "deceiving the bank's auditors and of cheating the Singapore exchange", including forging documents.
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District judge Richard Magnus convicted Nick Leeson and sentenced him to six and a half years in Changi Prison in Singapore.
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Nick Leeson was released in July 1999 after serving at least two-thirds of his sentence for good behaviour, and having been diagnosed with colon cancer, which he survived despite grim forecasts.
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In 1996, Nick Leeson published an autobiography, Rogue Trader, detailing his acts.
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In 2003, as a mature student, Nick Leeson completed a BSc in Psychology at Middlesex University.
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Nick Leeson is a guest on the after-dinner and keynote speaking circuits, stating in 2019 that "two events a month is enough to keep me in the manner to which I'm accustomed".
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Nick Leeson was appointed commercial manager of Galway United in April 2005, rising to the position of general manager in November 2005.
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In March 2023, Nick Leeson joined Red Mist Market Enforcement Unit, a corporate intelligence firm run by former Black Cube operative Seth Freedman, and turned into an investigator of financial misconduct cases.
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In June 2005, Nick Leeson released a new book, Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress.
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Nick Leeson's name is mentioned in the credits of Rogue Trader together with Barings Bank losses of US$1,400,000,000.
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Nick Leeson married Lisa Sims, later known as Lisa Nick Leeson, on 21 March 1992.
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In 2003, four years after his release from Changi Prison, Nick Leeson married Leona Tormay, an Irish beautician.