only arbitrage trades, why were there no red flags waving and alarms
sounding when Leeson reported such large profits? In 1993, Leeson’s office
brought in about 20% of Barings worldwide profits, and during the first half
of 1994, it was responsible for about 50% of the bank’s earnings. By yearend
1994, Leeson’s reported profits were 500% of his budgeted estimate.19
Instead of critical scrutiny, Barings management seems to have convinced
itself that the source of the bank’s competitive advantage over rivals came
from its simultaneous membership on the Japanese and Singapore exchanges.
Management also seemed to have prided itself for having the
wisdom to hire Leeson, the golden boy of arbitrage trading.
A BANK FOR A POUND
It was not until the Singapore futures exchange issued a mega-margin call
in January and February 1995 that Barings’ directors in London realized
that Leeson’s trading was not arbitrage and that he was not a star trader.
The reckless trader had finally been identified. Barings sent a team of auditors
to Singapore, but it was too late. The losses continued to mount, and
soon exceeded the bank’s net worth of $500 million. Barings had no way to
recover, and efforts to extricate itself from financial ruin failed. Unlike the
near bankruptcy of 1890, no white knight came to the rescue. In the end,
ING Bank in the Netherlands bought Barings for £1.
Leeson’s trip to Malaysia turned from a vacation into a pathetic attempt
to escape. He went into hiding by traveling to Borneo and then on to Frankfurt,
where he was apprehended and extradited to Singapore. Leeson
pleaded guilty to fraud and spent three-and-a-half years of a six-and-a-halfyear
sentence in a Singapore jail. While in prison, he was diagnosed and
treated for colon cancer, and his marriage dissolved.
AFTERMATH OF THE BARINGS FAILURE
The failure of Barings Bank PLC shocked the financial industry into realizing
just how powerful one trader’s undiscovered and unsupervised transactions
could be. As a result of this catastrophe and others that occurred in the
1990s, the financial industry set its sights on the target of implementing