THE ECONQMIST JULY 3RD 1999

THERE was something almost awe-in­spiring about the collapse in 1995 of Barings. 1hat Britain's oldest merchant bank should have run up such ruinous losses was remarkable enough; that it had done it through the activities of a lone 27­year-old derivatives trader in Singapore was mind-boggling. But it tums out that there were simple enough explanations for what was, in fact, a mundane affair. Bar­ings' top management could have won prizes as upper-class twits but should not have been allowed to run a comer-shop, let alone a bank.1he trader himself, Nick Lee­son, was a soft-hearted sap who started on the road to perdition to cover up a blunder by a junior colleague, and appeared to think he was dealing in cappuccino options.

1hat at least is how the déba­cle appears in a new film, "Rogue Trader", which was releasedjust ahead of its subject, who is to be freed from Singapore's Changi prison on July 3rd. It is hard to make a wholly boring film out of Mr Leeson's extraordinary story, but the makers of this one have done their best. One excuse might be that the abstruse mar­kets where he built up his losses are not exactly cinema tic. Hence the cameo role for a cup of cap­puccino, which he uses to ex­plain the futures market to his staff (and the audience). But the film even makes a hash of capturing a truly drama tic moment -the Kobe earthquake of January 1995. It wrought dreadful devastation, and buried Mr Leeson's hopes that his bets on the future leve! of Japanese share prices might ever come good.

Still the film has its moments-espe­cially those of perhaps unintended hu­mour. When the truth comes to light, Peter Baring, chairman of the bank, is interrupt­ed at a dinner party by a telephone call which begins with the glorious understate­ment, "I'm afraid I've got some rather bad news." The cruel portrayal of the bungling, smug and snobbish top brass at Barings is a caricature-but not wholly invented. At the time of the disaster one (true-life) Bar­ings expatriate lamented that "one of our barrow-boys has gone AWOL."

1he odd British obsession with peo­ple's class backgrounds helps to explain the confusion felt in both "Rogue Trader" and much of the British press about Nick Lee­son. To some he is a criminal who brought misery to ordinary people. 1hey include the bank's bondholders and, one Baring family member is reported to have claimed, 200,000 African children whom, but for Mr Leeson, Barings' charity would have saved from river blindness. 1hese critics rail against the money Mr Leeson will make selling his story. But to "Rogue Trader" and others Mr Leeson is a victim-the working-class lad who becomes a whizz-kid only to be made a scapegoat for the incompetence of the greedy, oaf­ish toffs he works foro While in prison he has been divorced and undergone surgery for cancer, so it is easy to feel sorry for him. Certainly he pities himse!f. 1he film ends with his own words expressing his occasional regret that he did not stash some mon­ey away for himself-though one newspaper reports that he boasted to a cell-mate that he had done just that. In which case he was much less of a victim, and a much better villain, than the film makes out.

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