French bank Societe Generale's board keeps CEO, orders probe
French bank Societe Generale kept its embattled CEO and promised a thorough probe of huge trading losses blamed on a single trader, while the country's central bank chief on Wednesday questioned why "malfunctions" at the company went ignored.
By PTI |
PARIS: French bank Societe Generale kept its embattled CEO and promised a thorough probe of huge trading losses blamed on a single trader, while the country's central bank chief on Wednesday questioned why "malfunctions" at the company went ignored.
The board unanimously asked Chief Executive Daniel Bouton and co-chief executive officer Philippe Citerne to continue in their posts, and "confirms its confidence" in them, board member Jean-Martin Folz said.
Folz, former CEO of PSA Peugeot Citroen, was named to head a committee that the Societe Generale board is setting up to investigate billions of dollars in losses that the bank announced last week, stunning an already shaky banking world.
The committee has asked auditing firm 'Price Water House Coopers' to help in the probe, the bank said in a statement. It will examine the causes and sizes of the trading losses and look into whether the bank accurately communicated information about the scandal.
The statement gave no timetable for the committee's report.
Bouton offered to resign as the trading crisis unfolded last week and the bank said it had lost US$7.09 billion in unwinding trades by 31-year-old futures trader Jerome Kerviel. The board refused his offer.
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Questions have mounted about how Kerviel could have been allowed to fool his superiors, and how the bank handled the discovery of Kerviel's unauthorised transactions. "We must focus on the reasons why the anomalies, the malfunctions, were not spotted, analysed, or passed upward to a high-enough level, dealt with and followed up. That is going to be at the heart of our investigation," Bank of France chief Christian Noyer said at a hearing before the French Senate.
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