25 Million Pounds - BBC Documentary

Video Transcription:

  25 Million Pounds - BBC Documentary (1996)

I'm here to introduce a fabulous new game it's called banking everyone's doing it all you need to play it with are one of these one of these one of these and one of these like many in the 1980s nick gleason wanted to be rich and successful but nick gleason was also a very strange man he had an extraordinary ability to manipulate and deceive those around him this is his story it is also the story of those he deceived they willingly entered into a dream he wove lured by the prospect of vast sums of money and together they lost 830 million pounds it sounds like the taxes in 1986 mrs thatcher deregulated the city of london the old division between banks and stock brokers was removed the gentlemanly image of the banker was replaced by that of the trader nick gleason was working as a clerk for the giant american bank morgan stanley on the surface he appeared just like everyone else in this new world a boy from the suburbs who wanted to be a trader it's very easy for me to get on with people but i don't necessarily have to like you or any of the people that i work with to get on with them so i can i come in i do my job i do it to the best of my ability and then at the end of the day if you are going to ask me out for a drink i'm not going to go out for a drink with you because i don't like you but i'm not going to tell you that there's no reason for there to be any animosity during the day i just didn't like the people that i worked with and so i would go and do the work be very very friendly everybody would probably say that they thought they were my best friend and if they if they have the knowledge then i will attempt to get that knowledge through whichever way is is best and if the friendship is that method then friendship is the method that i would use in 1989 leeson asked to become a trader but morgan stanley refused he decided it was time to move this time he chose a british bank it wasn't a money thing i could have stayed at morgan stanley for an extra five grand but you know if they've stopped me doing something once who's to say they're not going to do it again and so i moved to bearings at that stage i probably would be happy to say that i've never heard of bearings but it was a famous old man so there's no bearings in watford bearings was the oldest merchant bank in britain it had been run by the bering family for over 200 years they were related to practically everyone including princess diana and tiggy leg burke working for the bank was a family tradition i decided to be a banker not a very conscious decision when i came down from oxford in 1950 and had to earn my living and was able to go into bearings and try my hand there bearing's power was its name it could raise capital on the best of terms because everybody knew that its clients were the cream of british society even the queen held an account of bearings it was a discreet safe bank with a deep sense of superiority bearings had a wonderful franchise particularly in britain but it was certainly smug it was certainly arrogant it had always been at the heart of the establishment it had always been regarded really very special you know i mean i think i think probably the bank of england gave it considerable indulgence because it was bearing brothers but bearings had a terrible secret in its past something that even today the family are reluctant to talk about a hundred years ago the bank sent a young clerk to argentina it was the emerging market of its time and the clerk persuaded bearings to invest in the building of sewers underneath buenos aires bearings sent millions of pounds hoping to sell the shares in europe but no one wanted them and the bank crashed bearings was rescued by the bank of england but edward bearing the head of the bank was ruined he never recovered and his son and grandson went to live in solitude on an island off the irish coast accompanied only by three wallabies bought from london zoo the name of the clerk who ruined the bank was nicholas nicholas bower nick gleason went to work for bearing securities six years before they had been a small team of stock brokers now they contributed over half the profits of the bank but behind this 80s success story leeson found an operation run on a shoestring [Music] just a totally different environment there was um you know morgan stanley everything was it was new you know all of the equipment was new um the furniture was new bearings everything is you know just tacky i suppose i can't describe it any other way the futures and options department was operating on a pc and on a software program that was written by one of the people that i worked with it was very much on the back of matchbox type things and there were a lot of problems gleeson had joined an organization falling apart after the boom of the eighties he worked as a bookkeeper trying to keep track of the bank's money and he was good at it soon he was sent overseas to sort out problems in jakarta he found huge sums of money owed to the bank by its clients it was typical bearings bearings had paid for a lot of stock and hadn't actually received anything back from the customs the figure was 100 million pounds they just didn't have the right people in place to control it and monitor the settlements you know they'd go in and do the dealing and everything okay but then just the back office would fall apart all the time you know it was typical bearings in jakarta leeson met another clerk working for bearings lisa sims you don't sort of wake up one day and think i'm attracted to nick because you just grow on each other things that you you know things that it could make me laugh used to eat i mean he's quite funny he does make you laugh and he is quite friendly how ambitious was he very you could just tell the minute you like i said you're in the working with nick he was in control of everything and very ambitiously wanted to get things done [Music] in march 1992 nick married lisa [Music] ten days before the wedding he had received some good news he was to be a trader at last bearings wanted him to go and run their futures operation in singapore leeson asked lisa to leave her job and come with him and she agreed i thought yeah i want to spend the rest of my life with nick all i wanted was my little house a car 2.4 children and to be happy [Music] what everyone wants really just to be comfortable and i thought that's what nick wanted too leeson was going to trade in one of the newest and most exciting of the financial markets futures he went to work on cymex singapore's international monetary exchange in the heart of the city's financial district leeson's job was to buy and sell futures these are bets on the way a market will move in the future he traded on the nikkei the japanese stock market he was acting under orders from both the bank and its clients if the market moved the way they had predicted they made money if it didn't their losses mounted rapidly nick is a really cool person on the floor you won't believe it and everybody is all excited and anxious and he will be just holding the line and then he just report the figure to the line on the other line and then the next moment once he get instruction of selling or buying him he would go shouting to the boy on the floor and they will all listen to him and they will do it very fast and maybe within a minute or whatever he could have buy 500 and sell 500 lots he's real cool real cool it was hard work you know there was a lot of pressure i prefer the pressure you know more than anything else whether it was the excitement i can't really say in the summer of 1992 the market fluctuated violently in the chaos leeson's team began to make serious mistakes mistake was always done by very new traders new linemen when the customers say sell a lot and then he she went by one lot you know instead of putting here sell a lot like this and she put like that so inc instead of selling one lot now you have to sell 11 lot well do you cover it or don't you cover it and at the same time this the market was sometimes up a thousand points there were four or five days when it was going up a thousand points in a row so if you're out 500 contracts and you're looking at a thousand points you're looking at two and a half million dollars it's an awful lot of money and they always go boss i make a mistake and then nick will go okay i settle it there's not a lot i can do about it 11 o'clock on a friday night and you know by the time monday comes around the market's probably opened up a little bit higher so now the loss has increased the normal response of a trader would be to tell head office but instead lisa hid the losses he didn't want to go back to being a clerk he put the losses into a computerized account called the five eights account and altered his software so london wouldn't see what he was doing his only problem then were margin payments these are small down payments made on every future the bank later gets the money back from its clients the only way to get this money was to ask london solution took a chance he told head office it was for futures he had bought for clients but the clients didn't exist it was a blatant lie from the first time i do anything i'm not expecting to survive anymore anything more than two days as it as you obviously as you get past the two day to the uh the two day period then you start to get more confidence because it isn't being found if it's not found after two days when is it going to be found to me it's obvious if they can't see it after two days then who says they're going to see it after 200 days 500 days a thousand days you know so you start to get a little bit you don't get confident but you you're getting away with it it's easy as the weeks passed london carried on sending lease and money they failed to notice that there was no equivalent money coming in from clients leeson had discovered a weakness in the system he would hide his mistakes and trade out of them in his own time and no one would ever know but the weakness that leeson had discovered was just one crack in an organization that was falling apart bearing securities was in crisis by the summer of 1992 its operating losses were 39 million pounds the parent bank decided to move in a traditional banker his name was peter norris how shocked were you by the lack of control in that when you got in there and began to work there i was shocked um i was shocked because i didn't feel that it should have been allowed to to reach that point it was a clash of cultures peter norris was a merchant banker he believed in control and good bookkeeping the culture he met in bearing securities was that of the eighties a buccaneering spirit where controls were seen as a hindrance they stopped you making money but as leeson had discovered this attitude bred chaos there was a culture which said that businesses of that type operated far better in an informal environment than a formal environment i think that was a significant error of judgment so lisa's not completely wrong no bering brothers decided to take over bearing securities the cowboys of the 80s were kicked out and peter norris moved his own team in they set about counting the money and imposing controls norris became the chief executive if he didn't stop the losses bearing securities might go bankrupt if operating losses had continued at the level they were that could have had a very serious effect on that business's ability to finance itself may be derailed because of that it was a bad time frankly i find it quite frightening yes but the bank's losses were actually much higher than norris realized gleason's deception had gone badly wrong throughout the end of 1992 the market had gone against him as it did so the losses he had hidden mounted up the secret five eights account turned into a monster with a life of its own at one point it held losses of four million pounds a massive loss i mean it was it was a massive loss but um you know and the margin margin payments were increasing um the market was going against me on a daily on a daily basis and something had to be done about it and the loss was just accelerating you know it starts to get pretty frightening you know i'm not sleeping at night but leeson decided to go on he took the classic gambler strategy he doubled up secretly he bought hundreds more futures it was incredibly dangerous and against all the banks rules but it meant that if the market did move his way he would make a great deal of money and wipe out his losses why did i choose to go on um what what is the option to choosing to go and to deciding to go on you know you have to realize the loss i didn't want to cause bearings to lose all this money and so i'm operating in the belief that i can get it back you know maybe it goes back to the confidence thing i don't know i mean i'm confident i can get it back at that stage i suppose [Music] then suddenly in the spring of 1993 the market did move his way day by day he made hundreds of thousands of pounds and in july he wiped out his losses success you know i was elated um you know i mean we had a barbecue at home with some friends and then playing a stupid game afterwards pictionary or something like that all getting pretty drunk around my apartment in singapore and um you know i was happy when the nightmare was over there was a big group of us but we were out on the we had like a little balcony and nick just said that he'd been under a lot of pressure at work and that he'd lost money and that but now you know he'd recoup the losses and everything was okay and then he i said well how much did you lose and nick said a million pounds i just told her that we had a problem and you know i'd been covering up a few trades and just told her a figure i don't know what to use million dollars or something but then reading the book i find out it was six million i mean just as well he didn't tell me it was six million at the time because i think i would have hit the rule i fainted first and and he scraped me up first and then i would have sort of torn him off but i just think i know it was just unreal that money i mean six a million pounds was was terrible to you know i thought oh nick you know think you know think about us in the future than rather than protecting them and don't do it again and on the monday he did it again not by all accounts why do you think you did that because i don't think you wanted to be seen as a failure as i suppose early morning like i said everyone wants to be seen as a success i suppose he thought well i've done it before and it worked out okay maybe i can do it again i don't know why he did it best questions i need to ask nick you've just lived through nine months of what you described a nightmare here you are start to do it again i'm not a psychologist i can't explain it but um yeah i didn't let the people down [Music] leeson started his deception again but this time it was not to cover up other people's mistakes it was a deliberate fraud he began to use his secret account to give his clients cut price deals he sold them futures at unreal prices making a loss for himself he then took these losses and hit them away in the secret account my concerns were here's something that we've that we're seeing which we weren't expecting to see where the profitability is growing and one needs to be cynical about growing profits and know exactly how they produced in may i went down there and met the people that were there what struck you was that he was a complex guy there was no doubt when you met nick that he was complicated and that there were things going on below the surface that that that didn't come out in naturally in conversation i suppose that my overriding impression was somebody who was very polite somewhat overly different the man standing in front of baker was actually hiding losses of 94 million pounds throughout the end of 1993 chaotic world events had pushed the market against leeson he had tried to double up but this time it hadn't worked he was now at the mercy of the market on some days he lost more than a million pounds it was out of hand you know the market movements that i'm allowing are increasing at the same time everything is increasing you know my capability to accept the loss the capability to accept a larger market movement the capability to accept a larger position everything increases during the period you know as everything's building i felt we needed to investigate the operation and i felt that he's an individual seemed immature and a guy who was who was who was struggling with um with his changing role but um did you think he was hiding something no i didn't think he was hiding something i thought he was somebody who was having trouble adjusting to the need to talk to senior people about what he did leeson was also being noticed by those in charge of sending him money as his losses mounted he told the usual story the money was for clients but the new men had noticed there was something wrong these clients weren't paying their bills for the first time an internal audit was being done and they told the auditors of the problem in july the auditors flew to singapore by this time the secret five-eights account held losses of more than a hundred million pounds you have to expect um everything to be found they're supposed to you know the nature of an audit is that they're supposed to test information and test documents now if you picked up any document it had the 5 5-8 account on it you know in some way or form any document had the 5-8 account on it so of course i'm worried [Laughter] they come in and they don't test any records so i can't be happier they didn't test one record one report yeah i mean it's not an audit leeson says that he was convinced he was going to be discovered and it would have been easy to discover him and they didn't right he portrays himself as a passive figure do you think that's true no uh i mean it's only my it can only be my uh speculation about it of course but i think he conducted a determined completely unscrupulous and ultimately extremely successful campaign to avoid discovery through that audit yeah it's complete amazement but um as you get to know the people at bearings you can then understand the amazement a lot of them are just bumbling fools and that's not me saying that with hindsight i think if anybody met them and they would get that impression they come out of some of the reports quite well because they're allowed to say what they like and i don't have an opportunity to answer back and make their comments look stupid which they are well i i think he's a he's a highly intelligent [Music] creature with a very highly developed skill in manipulating people around him in a quite extraordinary way he's like a virus gets into the workings of something that does work and perverts it utterly is an agent of destruction the auditors returned to london full of praise for leeson they worried about his dual role as both trader and bookkeeper but they completely failed to spot the most obvious evidence of his fraud the money being forwarded to leeson every day was not being repaid to the bank there were no clients but the auditors hadn't noticed was it nick or was it the auditors i think it's the auditors in the end nick would probably have been clever probably distracted people but at the end of the day there's a job there to be done it seems to me that they began to associate the commercial success of the organization somehow or other with the lack of controls you ran a london investment bank with pristine controls which you polished regularly but a global stock stock broker was a very different business and maybe that was a business in which um you let you let it rock and roll a little bit more than you do than you did with uh with the merchant bank because that was the way that business had been successfully run the people that were sent in to fix the controls were seduced by the commercial success of the organization and lost their way to the traditional bankers from bearings the 80s culture they had taken over was strange and alien but it was one that was making them a great deal of money far more than they had made as merchant bankers but what made that money was a willingness to cut corners and cheat customers it was a culture that leeson knew well where extra profits were often skimmed off clients accounts [Music] there's a lot of funny stuff that goes on you see it in the back office i mean at bearings for instance they have so many different suspense accounts where trades are fed through so that they can book the profits off the different accounts especially on the futures and options side that if they looked at those specific accounts i think that there could be something there that is illegal some of the charges that i am currently going to be tried on in singapore and it's standard practice in the industry and who wins out of that the the company bearings the audit reassured leeson's new bosses he was now seen as a clever trader living the high life in singapore but by the autumn of 1994 his secret losses totaled 160 million pounds and he found himself in a terrible trap to stop london being suspicious he had to seem to be making huge profits in fact his profits were small so he did something extraordinary he used his secret account to buy futures off himself at fantastic prices by doing this he was able to fake huge profits but his hidden losses grew even more it was a vicious circle he kept on having to do irrational things that would lose money on the exchange in order to produce the accounting effect necessary to continue to conceal as long as he can continue to get the cash then it didn't matter whether he did things that were unprofitable because in his own fantasy world he was a star [Music] you had almost a psychotic sort of figure toward the end of 1994 on the one hand the powerful trader supposedly making profits on the other hand the reality of the continual loser and having to do irrational things that would lose money gleason was now on a merry-go-round he couldn't get off each time he declared more profits he became more of a star but in reality each time he did this his losses grew it was an absurd situation but on the surface he was supremely self-confident this film taken at the end of 1994 shows everyone looking anxiously at the screens except for one man on the right nick gleason who was now known as the king of the exchange yeah it does make you look back and think obviously i don't know nick i thought i did i thought i knew him really well obviously there's a side to nick that i didn't know i only knew his colleagues and the friends of ours that worked on the floor and they only ever fed me with success stories saying how well nick was doing what a good trader he was so i just thought things were fine the fifths the lies that's what makes me angry why lie i'm he's what i mean i'm his wife why should he lie i mean i suppose lots of wives think that when they find out their husbands have been having an affair and they think oh you know they've been leading a double life and that's what it feels like not that we've nick's had an affair it feels like nick well nick was leading a double life leeson was now trapped by his own fake success it was escalating out of his control in september the singapore exchange celebrated its 10th anniversary the guest of honor was lee kuan yew the country's leader that night he announced singapore's own version of the big bang due partly he said to cymex's recent successes celebrates its 10th anniversary 10 years of continuous growth in liquidity everyone knew that the man behind much of this success was the king of the exchange nick gleason and bearings was to receive two awards that night so it was like a glory day for bearings everybody was so happy and so proud of ourselves we thought that nick is the one who's going to receive the prize on the stage but nick wouldn't go on stage to receive the award i mean i know it's a lie but um how did i feel i mean you know it again it's it's another thing that's increasing the pressure inside me because it's been opened up to a wider circle and they're seeing the same image which i know to be so false because they weren't true profits the 5 8 account would have totally wiped out the profits that were being reported so you were a fraud correct so i don't think he ever really was a trader i think that was the fantasy and to keep the fantasy going he needed two things one was the cash from london and the other one was the concealment of the losses so the concealment um let him continue to enjoy the fantasy but when the fantasy broke and he was forced to come back and deal with the fact that he really was a loser what nourishes and sustains him is his ability to fool people to be able to be one step ahead to be able to make them believe in something that's created by him as an illusion everyone now believed the illusion that leeson had created in december he was flown to new york bearings was holding a conference for many of its traders from around the world and nick leeson was the star he had made it appeared 28 million pounds turnover that year he was held up as the model for the future of the bank the cymex model lots of people were there it was probably the biggest sort of thing on this sort of basis that they've done for bearings and it really was i presume on the back of the profits that i was reporting out of singapore and there's all these people are doing these presentations and they're thinking [ __ ] we're going to make a load of money this year look how much money singapore's got now do i need that no leeson faced an audience of executives who badly wanted to believe in him all of them were to get vast bonuses that year some like ron baker of nearly a million pounds much of this was to come from leeson's profits but there were traders in the audience who didn't believe lisa they couldn't see how such fantastic profits could come from low-risk trading but bearings executives dismissed their worries is it possible to make such profits for what leeson was supposed to be doing yes i think uh i think if we had had somebody that was skillful um that was earnest and that was uh that was attempting to fulfill that commercial strategy as honestly as they could within symex during that year that we would have made money and decent money out of that out of that activity we have made 28 million pounds i think it's possible it is simply not the case that it's impossible for institutions like bearings to make very considerable profits from financial transactions with very little or virtually no risk so when people say they should have known that it was impossible to make high profits with low risk they're wrong i think they're wrong yes the reason that bearings executives believe there was no risk was yet another deception by lee they thought he had offset all his futures this meant that for every bet he had made leeson had an insurance policy he had made an equal bet on the market moving the other way but like all of leeson's activities this too was a lie none of his futures were offset i never queried for for an instant the basic premise of this business which was that it was an offset and it never even occurred to me that that that fundamental point [Music] um uh was untrue gleason's positions on the exchange were now vast every night he asked for hundreds of thousands of pounds in margin payments and bearings paid it yet those in charge of sending him this money knew there was something seriously wrong the bank's treasurer tony hawes knew that there was nothing like this amount coming in from clients he worried but he didn't do very much those who ran bearings were not only mesmerized by leeson's profits they didn't understand the very basics of the business they had taken over mr hawes has declined to be interviewed so senior managers within bearings bank knew that there were vast differences between what lisa was asking for and what you were being given yeah you were never told yeah should you have been told well of course you say yes i should i should why didn't you know well fundamentally because it wasn't raised in that way why not i don't know i don't know why didn't those people who ran bearings come to you and say what are you doing because they're stupid they don't understand the business and they should never have been in the position that they were in especially people like tony horse he was supposed to be controlling the global treasury function he was supposed to understand derivatives he didn't and he would pay the money every single day would accept you know pretty ridiculous explanations for me it wouldn't happen at morgan stanley at variance they had a lot of idiots basically in every one of the controlling functions they were asking questions but they weren't going deep enough they didn't understand the basics of the business and you were creating a large amount of profits fictitiously yeah but they were also paying me an awful lot of money that they couldn't justify so if you were thinking that the profits were real and yet you were still paying 10 times as much in money that you couldn't account for what is the natural conclusion something is wrong by the end of 1994 the equivalent of three quarters of bering's capital had been sent to leeson the oldest merchant bank in britain had placed 330 million pounds on the activities of one man such was the power of the illusion that leeson had created that the men who ran the bank began to entertain strange dreams the chairman peter behring believed his family bank had returned to the glories of its past it had recaptured the global position it had lost 100 years ago that christmas leeson went on holiday to ireland with his wife he decided to tell her they weren't returning to singapore i'm trying to tell lisa that i don't want to go back pressure's too much what does she say um you know she knows what the bonus figure is the proposed bonus figure is supposed to be 450 000 pounds it was just this bonus imagine 450 000 pounds is such a lot of money you know it would have set us up for the rest of our lives it you know every week i sort of do six you know scratching the six number up doing six numbers to think i could have a chance of winning that kind of money you dream about that kind of money and to to think that nick had worked so hard to achieve it and then he said he didn't want to go back i couldn't understand it but he couldn't tell me why and he didn't tell me i just can't i can't face up to him i don't know you have to ask a psychologist it's the thing of letting people down i just can't do it you know maybe i try too hard to please i can't give you an explanation so leeson returned to singapore [Music] for a few days in january things went his way he had thousands of futures hidden in the secret account provided the market kept steady they could still make a lot of money the effect of the kobe earthquake on the japanese stock market was disastrous immediately the nikkei began to plunge it was bad you know um but again it's living to fight another day really i mean what did i feel i didn't go home and cut my wrists i didn't go and jump out of the building you know some people would do that but um you know with without the choice of running away from it you know i had to um bearings were still paying me money don't forget he's still paying me masses of money you know i mean we'd ask for sometimes for 100 million dollars they'd pay it leeson decided to take one last desperate gamble using bering's money he bought thousands more futures he was single-handedly going to try and hold the market up if you're desperate enough and you're that frightened of a huge loss you take the leap of faith and try to hold up the entire market you can you can feel it slipping away you can feel it slipping out of your hands but you know you you can't exactly pull it back you do something desperate like try to buy thousands of futures of contracts and hold the future and hold the market up in the days following kobe leeson took a terrifying switchback ride on the futures market if the market moved up only a few points he made millions of pounds in seconds so the numbers scared me you know i wasn't uh i didn't really want to know what what the numbers were i was hiding from the numbers as much as possible i just really it was out of hand you know it was just it just gone completely crazy how it was continuing to go on a day-to-day basis i just can't explain to you but leeson's strategy failed the market began to fall again his losses were catastrophic on one day alone he lost 50 million pounds but he kept going to do so he needed vast margin payments from london every day that i make one of these requests for additional money i never expect it to come i expect somebody to say look hey what the hell's going on we've got 30 million pounds from our customers and yet you need 300 million to finance them how do you explain that you can't you literally cannot how how wide do you need what possible explanation could there be for needing 300 million pounds to finance a business that has a total exposure to the market of 30. you can't do it so you know but again it happened but leeson was more than the passive figure he portrays himself as to get this money he kept on declaring fake profits but now on a phenomenal scale in one week he declared 10 million dollars profit it was something that no one had ever seen before but bearings believed him i can't explain it because it's not a commercial reaction i mean little commercial reaction said well you know how it knows how earth is this man making this money um nobody else on earth is doing it this way it defies imagination a trader would know that that could not be achieved there was either something fundamentally wrong with the market all the man was taking risks very very big risks so how and it's not just peter norris but peter bearing the whole board looked at these results and appear completely to have believed them i just don't understand it i was pleased at the success of that business over that period of course you know matt had his tea party by now bearings were scouring the world's money markets to find the money to fund gleason but on the 24th of january they went over their overdraft limit with citibank and a meeting was called to discuss leasing worries were expressed about the size of his positions but the bank's executives agreed amongst themselves that leeson was doing rather well his profits were high they told one another precisely because of the kobe earthquake it had produced chaos in the markets which lee was cleverly exploiting [Music] in retrospect i'd have to say that virtually everything about that discussion was absolutely mad and that we were we were living in a in a in a in a world through the looking class where logic was apparent but was actually completely perverted it seems completely bizarre a group of rational intelligent experienced competent people were dealing with a matter in this in a way which was totally variance with reality you mean they were blinded by the prophets well you say yes it's a question of degree i think it's more that critical faculties were were less engaged than they might have been to put it at it's least because there were profits but even when the truth stared them in the face bearings still kept sending lease and money the bank's auditors now discovered a 50 million pound loss which lee hadn't managed to hide using scissors and glue at home leeson concocted paperwork that showed it was a loan to another bank he faxed it through to the auditors he forgot that on the top would be printed from nick and lisa completely ludicrous you know and it doesn't hold up to investigation but it was accepted i don't know how but you know it was accepted why i don't know i mean maybe i'm a believable person i don't know but then finally on the 17th of february a clerk working for bearings found strange discrepancies in leeson's accounts for six days leeson eluded him on the seventh gleason decided it was time to go should i come up with this story about uh lucy's not being well and i need needing to go home to see him and i'd be back in 45 minutes and we'd tie up a few loose ends that we had to do and then we leave i mean it was a fight getting lisa to leave i'm telling her i told her it was a problem i didn't go any further than that he said you know i need to have a chat fine you know so we had to drive in the car and he said that he's under lots of pressure at work if he didn't get away and think about things he'd have a nervous breakdown that's how i rationalize it in the end to her to get her to agree to come on we took some golf clubs back that i borrowed the week before to one elise's twins i went to a shop and picked up a deposit that we'd had for laserdiscs picked that up [Applause] and a cup of tea and some chocolate biscuits i went home packed the suitcases and we took off to the airport good evening crisis talks have been going on all day at the bank of england to work out a deal to save britain's oldest merchant bank bearings is facing bankruptcy after one of its traders lost nearly 400 million pounds on dealings in the far east he has now vanished the bank of england is racing to arrange a rescue before the tokyo stock market opens in a few hours time leeson and his wife had fled to a luxury resort on the malaysian coast kota kinabalu we just spent a normal weekend in california still waiting to see what the situation is i never expected variance to go past did you ask yourself at that point why does it all happen no it was you know a combination of errors um you know i should have i should have referred it to people i didn't and it escalated i don't think that there is a simpler explanation late on the sunday night the bank of england decided it was impossible to save bearings next day traders pushed the market down leeson's losses doubled from over 400 million pounds to 830 million in one day and the oldest merchant bank in britain was no more two days later nick and lisa left kota kinabalu for frankfurt did you talk on the flight no no we didn't talk actually i don't really talk on a flight anyway wherever i'm going i'll just watch the film and and sleep i'm not being funny but i didn't want to be talking about it i didn't want to know i just didn't why not because i suppose i didn't want it to be real for you know a boy from watford to bring a grand firm down i mean it was a social insult as well it wasn't even one of their own kind [Music] which is where i suppose the smugness comes in isn't it just simply can't happen to jefferson like us you know bearings things like that didn't happen i mean it just didn't happen [Applause] bearings or banks well it does happen to banks um not not always the same way but it does not bearings [Music] we found one of nick's photograph in the in the drawer and we put nick's photograph up and we say nick we do respect you he can do it who can do it nobody else can do it to bring down such a big bang and remember he spoke to some of the traders and they all say oh what would you like to be and he said i would never want to be rich i want to be famous i want to be well-liked and so when things happen we say oh nick you made it [Music] what would be your your message tonight to peter bearing if he's watching i don't know i i mean i i don't really have a message to peter barry you know i felt the frost interview was very controlled i think we're still probably seeing mirrors and we're probably still seeing somebody who feels powerful in his ability to fool us and is sustained by that and however naive and stupid this may sound i was always working in the best interests of the bank i think he's a guy who is living out a dream playing out his fantasy as the rogue trader when in reality he's just an accountant cooking the books you keep making excuses that's all we keep on doing is making excuses and sometimes i'm cheesed off we keep making excuses and i think why should we keep making excuses you know you i just want to ask nick it's no good i keep saying what i think is no one knows unless nick until nick actually says well the reason i did it was maybe he doesn't even know himself i really don't care what people think i don't care what you think i don't care what the average man in the street thinks i think that they are typically on my side that's the impression i get from the letters that i receive while i'm in here but um it's not something that really matters to me why are they on your side i don't know last name what are you then if you don't care about what people think what are you like um why does it matter you know the only people that really that to answer that question are the only people that i'm really answering that question to are the people who care who matter to me and you know i don't think it's a question that's worth answering it's your lucky day double your money and take it away so run...