The Man Who Broke The Bank Young Trader Tells How His Actions Brought About The Collapse Of A 232-Year-Old British Financial Institution

It was another frantic day on the Singapore markets, and trader Nick Leeson activated a secret account, numbered 88888 for luck, to cover up for a young colleague who’d made a $35,000 mistake.

By the time the British whiz kid fled, account No. 88888 concealed multi-milliondollar losses that brought down Britain’s oldest investment bank, Barings.

“Not every day is a down day. So it adds to your belief that you can do it,” Leeson, 28, said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. at a German jail. “Unfortunately, I lost more than I won.”

It was the Leeson’s first interview since the 232-year-old bank collapsed in February under Leeson’s ever more desperate bets on the Tokyo market that ended up $1.8 billion wrong.

The BBC interview will be broadcast today on the program “The Man Who Broke The Bank” about the Barings collapse.

The CBS program “60 Minutes” showed excerpts of the interview Sunday night.

Leeson said he panicked as losses spiralled and Barings poured in millions from London.

“I knew there was a lot of damage. I was frightened of quantifying the amount,” Leeson told interviewer David Frost.

“You know, I would get faxes in the morning telling me the amount of funding the girls (clerks) were requesting but I was trying desperately not to go to the office that it didn’t stare me in the face. I was trying to hide from it.”

Leeson, interviewed at Hoechst prison in Frankfurt, looked fit but often sounded hesitant.

Leeson, a plasterer’s son raised in public housing project north of London, became a bank clerk after failing mathematics at high school.

A meteoric career that took him to a luxurious life style as manager of Barings in Singapore ended in an international debacle that cost investors in the bank millions of dollars.

Leeson was arrested in Frankfurt on March 2 as he tried to fly home after fleeing with his wife, Lisa, to a resort in Malaysia on Feb. 23, when losses were about $504 million.

Those losses soared to $1.3 billion during frantic attempts to save Barings, which finally was taken over by the Dutch insurer ING.

In July, a Bank of England inquiry laid most of the blame for the collapse on Leeson and criticized Barings for allowing him to make enormous unauthorized bets.

Leeson said there is a risk of other traders operating as he did, and offered to advise regulators on ways to stop it.

The offer appeared to be part of his fight to escape extradition to Singapore on fraud and forgery charges.

He wants to be tried and jailed in Britain, which has sent white-collar criminals to low-security prisons. British authorities have refused to ask for his extradition.

Leeson maintained that account No. 88888, activated in September 1992, was intended only to cover up trading errors, and said he didn’t make any money from it.

Asked why he didn’t stop as things worsened, Leeson replied, “Stupid as it may sound, none of this is really real money, it’s not as if you have cash sitting in front of you.”

Leeson contemplated the prospect of jail with relief.

“I’ve nothing to hide. I’m the guy who wants to go to jail now,” he said. “But I don’t think of myself as a criminal. I didn’t steal any money. I’ve certainly misled people. … I was trying to correct a situation. And however naive and stupid this may sound, I always working for the best interests of the bank.”