Account 88888

What actually happened

Leeson's reported profits made him a star; the reality accumulated in 88888, papered over with forged confirmations and funding requests London kept wiring. The Kobe earthquake in January 1995 moved markets against his doubled-down positions faster than the fiction could absorb. Final losses reached about £827 million.

He fled, faxed his resignation ('my sincere apologies for the predicament that I have left you in'), and was arrested in Frankfurt. The Bank of England's report read less like a fraud story than a controls autopsy: nobody had ever separated the man who made the trades from the man who reported them.

ING bought Barings for £1. Leeson served four and a half years in Changi and has spent the decades since as the cautionary tale on the conference circuit.

The longer arc

Barings had underwritten sovereign finance for more than two centuries before Leeson ever touched it. The bank helped finance the United States' 1803 Louisiana Purchase, working with its Dutch partners to raise $15 million for a young government most of Europe would not lend to directly, and its clients over the years included the British royal family. Leeson was 28, with a background nowhere near matching that pedigree; his real qualification, in his managers' eyes, was that his Singapore desk appeared to be printing extraordinary profits, and nobody in London asked to see how.

Leeson was diagnosed with colon cancer during his imprisonment and underwent emergency surgery to remove part of his colon before his release in 1999. The saga became the basis for the 1999 film Rogue Trader, with Ewan McGregor playing him. He later built a public career around the collapse itself, writing a memoir, giving talks on risk and controls, and from 2005 running League of Ireland club Galway United, eventually as chief executive, until the club's own finances collapsed in 2011. The man who hid losses that sank a 233-year-old bank spent his second career running a much smaller organization's books in full view.