LONDON – London police charged Kweku M. Adoboli, a 31-year old UBS trader, with fraud “by abuse of position and false accounting” on Friday after the Swiss bank said it lost $2 billion because of unauthorized trades.
Mr. Adoboli received two charges of false accounting from 2008 to 2009 and one charge of abuse of position, a London Magistrates court said. The investigation is ongoing and being conducted by the London police in collaboration with the Serious Fraud Office, the Financial Services Authority and the Crown Prosecution Service.
The charge raises renewed questions about UBS’s risk management processes, which chief executive Oswald J. Grübel had pledged to improve when he took over in 2009. The chairman of UBS, Kaspar Villiger, said Thursday in a speech to a business group in Bern that “it was a very professionally managed case of fraud, possibly by one person acting alone” and that he felt “personally disappointed.”
A spokesman for UBS declined to comment but said that no further person was suspended over the issue.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/police-charge-ubs-trader-with-fraud/