ognizing exposures, but equally important, they create opportunities for
clever and unscrupulous employees to figure out how to take advantage of
the permissive treatment of temporary imbalances. Nick Leeson was certainly
both clever and unscrupulous.
Barings had strict trading limits and believed that it was diligently monitoring
all its traders to make sure they did not exceed their limits, but the
bank’s systems were not prepared for the level of fraud and misrepresentation
that Leeson committed, and Barings was not aware of the secret passageway
Leeson found to its crown jewels. In July 1992, shortly after being
assigned to Singapore and only a couple of days after Barings gained membership
on SIMEX, Leeson opened an 88888 Account, just like the one he
uncovered in Barings’ Indonesia branch.7 By 1993, just a year after his arrival,
Leeson began reporting extraordinary profits.
From the perspective of Barings London, there was nothing suspect about
Leeson setting up the 88888 Account. After all, a separate account for settling
transaction discrepancies was normal, but what went on in this account
was apparently off the radar screen of Leeson’s managers in London
and Singapore. Leeson set himself the goal of becoming the protector of his
newly discovered door to fortune and fame. Within a week of opening the
88888 Account, he had its reporting software changed so that transactions
in the account did not appear on the daily internal performance reports.8
You may ask, “What well-managed bank would allow its chief trader to
be in charge of the back office, as well?” The answer is easier to understand
once you realize that, initially, Barings’ Singapore branch was supposed to
be executing orders placed exclusively by Barings affiliates worldwide on
behalf of their customers. It was some time afterward that BFS also began to
conduct independent arbitrage transactions, but from the standpoint of Barings
London, this new line of business posed no major security breach. BFS
was not supposed to be involved in any trading for the house’s account, so
Barings’ management might have reasoned that any loss of control by putting
Leeson in charge of the front and back offices was offset by the cost savings
of having one person cover two tasks.
As competition for customers became keener and profits declined, BFS
gradually began to take on positions of its own. Leeson was put in charge of
Singapore’s arbitrage activities, which meant he was supposed to have large
blocks of offsetting Nikkei 225 futures contracts traded simultaneously on