UBS trader Adoboli held over $2bn loss
Trader Adoboli Joined UBS Soon After College
By PAUL SONNE
In a little over a decade, Kweku Adoboli went from being an overseas student studying at a quiet Quaker boarding school in northern England to finding himself at the center of a major U.K. investigation into rogue trading, which UBS AG said Thursday has resulted in as much as $2 billion in losses.
The Swiss bank contacted the City of London police at 1 a.m. on Thursday morning with an allegation that one of its traders had committed fraud, police commander Ian Dyson said in a statement. A person familiar with the matter identified the 31-year-old man as Mr. Adoboli, who described his home country as Ghana on a photo-sharing webpage that appears to belong to him.
In response to the report, police detectives arrested the suspect at a Central London business premises at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday on suspicion of "fraud by abuse of position," Mr. Dyson said in a statement. On Thursday evening, the trader remained in custody, according to the authorities. He hasn't been charged.
Mr. Adoboli couldn't be reached for comment. It isn't clear if Mr. Adoboli has a lawyer yet.
Since September 2006, the 31-year-old Mr. Adoboli has worked in the European equities division of UBS, focusing in particular on exchange-traded funds, or large baskets of securities that often track particular stock indexes or commodities, according to what appeared be his profile on the Linked-In professional-networking site.
Mr. Adoboli worked on the Delta One desk, a trading unit that executes relatively low-risk trades usually using computer algorithms, according to the Linked-In page. Jérôme Kerviel, the Société Générale SA trader who received three years in prison after losing €4.9 billion of the bank's money on rogue trades in 2007 and 2008, also worked on a Delta One desk.
Before taking his current job on the trading desk at UBS, Mr. Adoboli worked for three years in a back-office position as a trade support analyst, according to the Linked-In profile. Trade-support analysts generally monitor computer programs and provide technical support for the algorithms that carry out trades.
Mr. Adoboli joined UBS about two months after finishing college in central England. The position fit his background: He graduated, with honors, from the University of Nottingham in July 2003 with a bachelor's degree in e-commerce and digital business, a spokeswoman for the university said. While there, he was involved in the University of Nottingham student union, at one point serving as its communications officer, according to a document from the union.
Before college, Mr. Adoboli attended the Ackworth School, a Quaker boarding and day school located in West Yorkshire, England. The school, which costs about $41,000 a year for international boarding students, confirmed in a statement that Mr. Adoboli attended from 1992 to 1998 as an overseas boarder.
UBS said its London employee Kweku Adoboli, shown here in 2010, allegedly lost $2 billion of the bank's money in unauthorized trades.
"He was an able student who made a very positive contribution to the School community," Kathryn Bell, the head of school, said in a statement. Ms. Bell said she wasn't the head of the school during the time that Mr. Adoboli was a student there.
It is unclear whether Mr. Adoboli attended another secondary school before matriculating at the University of Nottingham in 2000, or whether he spent two "gap years" between high school and college.
A number of his friends declined to comment when contacted by The Wall Street Journal.
Until recently, Mr. Adoboli lived in a loft apartment in London's trendy Spitalfields neighborhood, a short walk to the London offices of UBS, which are on the eastern edge of the city's financial district.
Outside the apartment building on Thursday, Mr. Adoboli's former landlord, Philip Octave, said the UBS trader moved out of the £1,000-a-week apartment four months ago. Mr. Octave called Mr. Adoboli "very, very polite, a salesman sort of chap."
On the Facebook profile under Mr. Adoboli's name, which was yanked from public view on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Adoboli listed the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti and dance-music artist MC Xander among his favorites. He is also a fan of the show "The Wire" and interested in Argentinean wine. Mr. Adoboli is also a member of two Facebook groups tied to Ghana, his home country.
Mr. Adoboli is also an amateur photographer. In addition to being in a number of Facebook photography groups, he apparently posted his pictures to a Smugmug photo-sharing site, where he talked about his high-end camera, a Nikon D300.
Though the photo site wasn't available Thursday afternoon, an archived version showed albums labeling portraits and scenes from Ghana, shots from a trip to Puerto Vallarta and photos of an engagement party and christening.—Jeanne Whalen and Sebastian Walsh contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904060604576572933761726432.html
Write to Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com
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