Ex-SocGen trader Kerviel changes legal team
PARIS (Reuters) - Jerome Kerviel, the banker blamed for the world's worst rogue trading scandal, has changed his legal team to focus on a more "aggressive" defense strategy, a spokeswoman for Kerviel said on Saturday.
"The new team's strategy is to go more on the offensive," Patricia Chapelotte, who is Kerviel's new public relations adviser, told Reuters.
The ex-trader at Societe Generale (SOGN.PA), France's second-biggest listed bank, has replaced his former lawyer Elisabeth Meyer and has a new team of six lawyers, led by Bernard Benaiem.
The other members of the team are Caroline Wassermann, Guillaume Selnet, Eric Dupond-Moretti, Francis Tissot and Eric Hemmerdinger.
Dupond-Moretti is one of France's best-known criminal lawyers.
High profile cases on which Dupond-Moretti has worked include the 2004 Outreau pedophile trial, murder investigations and a probe into the use of banned substances on the Tour de France cycling race.
Meyer, who successfully obtained Kerviel's release from prison earlier this year, said she was "disappointed" to no longer be on the case.
Kerviel was freed from prison in March after an appeal against his detention but he remains under formal investigation for breach of trust, computer abuse and falsification.
RECORD LOSSES
On January 24 SocGen unveiled 4.9 billion euros ($7.8 billion) of losses which it said were caused by rogue deals carried out by Kerviel, then a 31-year old junior trader at the bank.
SocGen has published several internal reports into the Kerviel affair.
The internal reports show that Kerviel started building up non-authorized trading positions in 2005 and 2006 for "small amounts," which got bigger from March 2007 onwards.
By the time SocGen discovered what was going on in late January Kerviel had amassed a position worth 49 billion euros -- greater than SocGen's own stock market value. The French bank then had to unwind this position between January 21 and January 23 into an already falling stock market.
The bank's report said Kerviel carried out rogue deals on warrants with a deferred start date, futures contracts and "forwards" deals using a counterparty within SocGen itself.
Kerviel managed to evade the scrutiny of top managers within his unit despite having raised alarms with derivatives exchange Eurex in 2007 and despite having been the subject of more than 70 "alert" warnings within SocGen itself.
In May a SocGen internal report said Kerviel may have had help from an assistant but added there was no conclusive proof of this.
Since April Kerviel has been working at French software company LCA, which is based near Paris. The founder of LCA, Jean-Raymond Lemaire, let Kerviel stay at his house just after the trading scandal broke.
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta)
