AN alleged rogue trader accused of gambling away £1.4 billion has described to a jury how he "lost control in the maelstrom of the financial crisis".
Kweku Adoboli, 32, a former University of Nottingham student, is accused of committing Britain's biggest ever fraud while working for Swiss bank UBS. He denies two counts of fraud and four counts of false accounting between October 2008 and last September after he set up an "umbrella" fund for off-book trades.
Jurors at Southwark Crown Court heard the fund was doing well until he changed from a conservative "bearish" position to an aggressive "bullish" stance under pressure from senior managers.
Describing the moment when he began to make serious losses as European markets crashed in July last year, he said: "I absolutely lost control.
" I was no longer in control of the decisions around the trades we were doing."
The former public schoolboy, of Clark Street, Whitechapel, east London, worked for UBS's global synthetic equities division, buying and selling exchange traded funds (ETFs), which track different types of stocks, bonds or commodities such as metals.
He claims senior managers were fully aware of what he was doing and encouraged him to push the boundaries to make profits for the bank.
The case continues.
