Trader sentenced, ordered to repay $6.7B

PARIS, Oct. 5 (UPI) -- A French court Tuesday ordered rogue Societe Generale trader Jerome Kerviel to spend a minimum of three years in prison and pay back the bank $6.7 billion.

Kerviel was given a five-year prison sentence, but two of the five years were suspended. He was also ordered to find another line of work, The New York Times reported.

Societe Generale spokeswoman Caroline Guillaumin said, "It is important and we are satisfied," that the trader who lost billions in unauthorized trades in 2008 was ordered to pay restitution for his mistakes. "It recognized that the entirety of the bank's losses are attributed to Jerome Kerviel's actions," she said.

Kerviel's attorney Olivier Metzner called the sentence "totally unreasonable" for the same reason -- that it exonerated the bank where supervisors or fail-safe procedures could have stopped the trading sooner than it did.

The sentence "suggests that the bank is not responsible for anything," he said, "that no system of control could have prevented this."

For the time being, Judge Dominique Pauthe, the presiding judge, allowed Kerviel to remain free until the conclusion of an appeal that is likely to take another year, the Times said.

At his trial, Kerviel said he purposefully hid his trading from the bank, but also claimed bank supervisors had intentionally looked the other way, allowing the trades to continue.

The losses, at the time, came to about $7 billion.