Nick Leeson (Exhibit 7.1) came from humble origins compared to most of Barings’ officers. He had no family ties to the nobility, did not attend Eton, and did not serve in the Coldstream Guards. The son of a Watford plasterer, Leeson’s first job at Barings was as a clerk, but he rose swiftly. His big break came when he was sent to the Barings’ Indonesian office to sort out a 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