20110923
Reuters
LONDON (Reuters) - The Quaker Christian school that UBS trader Kweku Adoboli attended as a teenager made quiet periods of reflection a daily part of student life.




There will have been plenty of time for the Ghanaian to continue the practice since his arrest a week ago on multiple charges of fraud.

"(Adoboli) is sorry beyond words for what happened," his lawyer Patrick Gibbs told a London court on Thursday.

"He stands now appalled at the scale of the consequences of his disastrous miscalculations."

Adoboli, who has been charged with fraud and false accounting dating back to 2008 that UBS says cost it $2.3 billion, had worked at the Swiss bank since 2006, initially in a trade support role.

His case inevitably has sparked comparisons to that of Societe Generale's Jerome Kerviel, who racked up a $6.7 billion loss in unauthorised deals in 2008.

Like Kerviel, who also began his investment banking career in a back office role, Adoboli worked with so-called Delta One products, derivatives which closely track the underlying securities and give the holder an easy way to gain exposure to several asset classes.

According to UBS, the baby-faced 31-year-old concealed "unauthorised speculative trading in various S&P 500, DAX, and EuroStoxx index futures" by creating fictitious hedging positions in internal systems.

The losses are a heavy blow to Switzerland's biggest bank, which had just started to recover after it almost collapsed during the financial crisis and faced a U.S. investigation into aiding wealthy Americans to dodge taxes.

They also effectively cancel out the 2-billion-Swiss-franc savings UBS hoped to make in a cost-cutting drive detailed last month involving 3,500 job cuts.

VERY, VERY NICE GUY

A computer science and management graduate, Adoboli lived until recently in a 1,000-pound per week apartment in London's East End, a short walk from UBS's office where he was arrested in the early hours of September 15.

His former landlord Philip Octave described him as well-spoken and smartly dressed, with a steady girlfriend, although he fell behind a couple of times on the rent.

"He lived here for about 2-1/2 years. He was a very, very nice guy. I have not got a bad word to say about him. He was not the tidiest person but he was a good tenant," he told reporters gathered outside the apartment in London.

Octave said Adoboli enjoyed the bars around the area, where the wealthy City of London rubs shoulders with the grimier East End, while neighbours quoted in the British press described how he had held loud, lavish parties at the flat.

His now-removed profile page on social networking site Facebook listed the swanky Boundary Bar, which has a large rooftop terrace with panoramic views of London, among his interests.

Adoboli, described by his 20,000 pound-a-year school as "an able student", also appears to have been a sociable character while at Nottingham University, where he worked on the Students Union Committee and once took charge of organising "freshers" week festivities for new students.

"I brought them up to be God-fearing and to appreciate decency," his father John Adoboli, a former U.N. staff officer who served in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Kosovo, told Reuters of Kweku and his siblings.

John, who lives in an affluent neighbourhood in the Ghanaian port city of Tema, described himself as a "self-made man", and said the family was heartbroken when it heard the news.

"Fraud is not our way of life," he said.