SGX has come a long way since Barings debacle

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, Nick Leeson, a 28-year-old head of derivatives at Barings Bank in Singapore, made more than US$1 billion in unhedged, unauthorised speculative trades, eliminating the merchant bank's cash reserves.

Britain's oldest investment bank, which was founded in 1762 and listed Queen Elizabeth II among its clients, was declared insolvent and ceased to exist in February 1995.

In charge of arbitrage trades involving contracts for the Japanese Nikkei 225 trading on both the Osaka Securities Exchange and the then Singapore International Monetary Exchange (Simex), Leeson manipulated internal accounting systems and falsified trading records in a bid to hide his losses from the bank's London headquarters.