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A Société Générale trader dismissed over unauthorised risky bets has hit out at the French bank, saying the “entire risk team and other bosses” were equally responsible and complaining his bonus had been withheld.
Kavish Kataria wrote on LinkedIn on Thursday that he was being made a “scapegoat” and said all his trades were correctly recorded and visible to his superiors in Hong Kong and Paris.
“Instead of taking the responsibility of the lapse in their risk system and not identifying the trades at the right time they fired me and terminated my contract,” Kataria said.
Kataria worked on the Delta One desk, the same derivatives trading area where rogue SocGen trader Jérôme Kerviel caused a €4.9bn loss 16 years ago in a scandal that still haunts the bank.
SocGen confirmed earlier this week that two people based in Hong Kong had left last year — a trader and a team leader — after a “one-off trading incident in 2023, which didn’t generate any impact and led to appropriate mending measures”.
Kataria did not exceed authorised limits on his trades but was dealing in options on Indian indices, which he had not been supposed to do, according to a person familiar with the matter. Because most were intraday trades this had not been detected straightaway, the person added.
The trades did not generate losses, but went undetected for some time and could have been lossmaking in a harsh and sudden market downturn, the person familiar with the matter said.
In a public post, Kataria said he had not hidden his trades, which were booked automatically in the bank’s systems, generating an email to others at the lender showing the trades had been reconciled.
“If the risk management team and their risk system would have identified the trades on day one and would have informed me that the trades are not in your mandate I wouldn’t have traded that strategy,” he wrote.
He claimed he had made $50mn for the bank in eight months and complained his “previous year bonuses were also withheld and I was just paid seven days salary”.
“I would like to ask during all this time there was no one to check what has been happening on the desk?” he wrote. “I accept I did trade options on Indian indices and according to me it was in my mandate and well within the trading limits.”
“Trading industry is so big but there are no rules or regulations which fight for trader justice,” Kataria said.
SocGen declined to comment on Kataria’s statement.
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