UBS trader found guilty of fraud

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LONDON, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- A jury in London pronounced former UBS trader Kweku Adoboli guilty Tuesday on two counts of fraud related to trading losses of $2.3 billion.

He was acquitted on four counts of accounting fraud, the Guardian reported.

Adoboli, 32, said in his defense the bank put traders under enormous pressure to increase profits and his supervisors knew what he was doing. Prosecutors called Adoboli "arrogant" and said he bent the bank's rules willfully.

Prosecutors said at one point Adoboli had exposed the bank to potential losses of about $12 billion, a sum so large it would have forced the bank to close.

Adoboli was born in Ghana and began working at UBS in 2003 after he graduated from Nottingham University in Britain. By 2006, he had begun exchange-traded funds trading desk, considered a simple version of derivatives trading, The New York Times reported.

By 2008, he had set up proxy accounts to conceal profits and losses from rogue trading. At first, the trades did well but losses began to catch up with him by 2011.

As bank officials began to realize the extent of the losses, Adoboli left work one day in September 2011 and told his supervisors in an email he would accept "full responsibility for my actions ... and the (expletive deleted) storm that will now ensue."

The trial took two months and it took the jury five days to reach its verdict.