tangled mess in the back office.3 The Indonesia office had a large number of
stock trades that did not reconcile, because the trading volume on the Indonesian
stock exchange had grown so fast that the procedures for delivering
stock certificates could not keep up with the volume. The bank had
hundreds of small discrepancies between the stock certificates it held and
the certificates it was supposed to hold. The bank’s stock trading business
was profitable, and most of the discrepancies were small. Sooner or later the
vast majority of these discrepancies would be resolved as the paperwork finally
caught up with the backlog. It was Leeson’s job to sort out the problems
in Indonesia so branch operations ran smoothly.