When the director James Deardon met Nick Leeson in a Singapore jail they were separated by glass. Despite working for over a year on his film of Leeson's autobiography, Rogue Trader, the glass is still between them. Leeson remains as distant and enigmatic as ever.
Which is strange. Because Nick Leeson is not a reticent man. Indeed he's a compulsive storyteller. His fantastic fictions about the market were the means by which he bamboozled Barings and bankrupted the bank. As soon as he was arrested he started telling his tale in another form, collaborating with a ghost writer on his autobiography.
The book went to number one in the bestseller list in 1996. David Frost so warmed to Leeson after interviewing him for his show in Singapore, that he bought the film rights, convinced that Lesson had been caught in the crossfire of class and incompetence. Now the film has been made starring Ewan McGregor.
Baby-faced Leeson is the source of myths, to some a monster, to others a martyr, but to many an anti-hero who exposed the irrational edifice of the global market. But Leeson's story has gone wrong.
The story we want, certainly the one the film-makers want, is the tale of the Watford working-class boy whose beloved wife Lisa stuck by him and who will be out of prison soon to triumph again. In the film, Nick and Lisa are loyal and loving as they are in Leeson's book. She became an air stewardess for Virgin so she could fly out to be with him. In life, they divorced when she realised the scale of his deceptions (she is now marrying another City trader).
The scapegoating of Leeson has also been eroded, as earlier this year the Department of Trade and Industry got several Barings big cheeses banned from holding directorship. More brutally, however, Nick Leeson has cancer of the colon. He has been given a 70 per cent chance of survival after surgery and chemotherapy. An appeal for his release in the light of his illness was turned down.
It all began so promisingly. Nick Leeson went straight from school to a job with the British royal bank, Coutts, and worked for a succession of prominent London banks culminating in Barings. His loss of control in the Far East is a parody of Barings's history as the merchant bank of the British empire, the one that funded the Suez Canal.
In 1992, Leeson was appointed manager of a new Barings operation to deal in futures on the Singapore Monetary Exchange. By the end of his first year he was purportedly making profits so huge they formed a considerable percentage of Barings's worldwide income.
All senior Barings staff, right up to Sir Peter himself, were paid on a bonus basis, so no one asked any questions. "They completely bought into his myth," says Deardon, "revelling in somebody who was making them a lot of money. It was all hubris". What he was really doing was replacing the reality of commerce with pure spectacle. Leeson came to the futures market with no previous experience and readily recognised that the amounts of money on the computer screen were entirely fictitious. Futures contracts are agreements to buy or sell a commodity at a specified future date; speculating in these contracts was not a direct use of real money but a game of numbers on a screen.
For Leeson, the trading floor was a place where reality disappeared. He took the job in Singapore because he wanted to buy and sell where the real action was. He performed charismatically on the trading floor, but was less good at controlling his team, so they made serious errors which he had to put right because he was responsible for doing the figures in the office at the end of the day. This was his real area of expertise, but it was an inappropriate job to combine with trading.
When a Singaporean woman who had just joined his team lost £20,000 he tried to lose the transaction rather than sack her, in a manner he describes in the book as an act of gallantry. Leeson had access to an "error account", which Barings had forgotten existed. He hid the mistake in this notorious 88888 account. Then he realised that he could make every loss vanish in this way so the Singapore operation would always appear in profit. At first the hidden losses were small, but as he gambled on illicit "proprietary" deals to balance them, he made new losses and the secret figures mushroomed. He invented a mystery customer to explain the business. "His entire fixation at the time was to get through the next 24 hours," says Deardon. "I really believe he wanted to make it good again." By December 1994, Leeson's paper profits were so huge he was feted as the company's number one trader in the world. Meanwhile, his superiors in London were sending millions of dollars to Singapore every day to fund deals. Instead, they were covering losses. Auditors queried the missing 7.78 billion yen (£39.5 million) and he invented a fictitious deal to account for it. He sat in the office with scissors and paste forging the necessary documents. He got away with it. In February 1995, Leeson's losses multiplied in the wake of the Kobe earthquake, and he fled with Lisa for a weekend away, leaving the auditors to break open his desk and find the 88888 account statement. It recorded a debt of £850 million sterling, a figure that bankrupted Barings. Leeson was arrested getting off a plane in Frankfurt and extradited to Singapore, where he was sentenced to six years for fraud and forgery.
But Nick Leeson never stopped spinning stories. While he was fighting extradition in Germany, he collaborated with Edward Whitley on Rogue Trader. Agent Ed Victor picked up the book and it earned Leeson a £450,000 sterling advance. and so did Nick. He could be seductive when he wanted to be. In all the pictures of him he looks like Billy Bunter, but that was towards the end when he was gorging on sweets." Yet Leeson was no ordinary person. He lived an enormous lie for two years. His ability to succeed purely by looking successful was a mockery of the market. He confirmed that we live in a society where appearances crush reality. "At one point I asked myself if I was being gullible in buying his story hook, line and sinker?' says Deardon. "Does he have money stashed away? I would stake a lot of money that he doesn't." But, hedging his bets, he adds, "If he does he's a brilliant actor."
