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Kweku Adoboli, charming, well-spoken, had the respect of peers and a seven-figure salary in his short career in the City
The future that beckoned for Kweku Adoboli was glittering even by City standards. In just five years the charming and clever Nottingham University graduate rose from trainee to star trader at UBS, winning the respect of his colleagues and commanding a seven-figure salary to match.
His sprint to the top of his profession seemed all but unstoppable until 3.30 on Thursday morning, when City of London police turned up at the London headquarters of the Swiss bank to arrest him on suspicion of what the public know as rogue trading but which the law calls "suspicion of fraud by abuse of position".
The alarm bells had started to sound at UBS over the previous few hours and by 1am on Thursday morning senior staff were worried enough to call the police. Officers escorted one of their brightest traders from the building and took him to a nearby police station.
What occurred in the preceding few days is impossible to guess but, in an announcement that sent its shares plunging by nearly 10%, UBS warned of a potential loss of around $2bn (£1.3bn).
Not much more is known about the man at the centre of the allegations, other than that the 31-year-old equity trader enjoyed a life very similar to that of many of his peers. According to his Facebook page, now taken down, he enjoyed cycling, Argentinian wine, technology, watching The Wire, and messing about on the internet.
Adoboli, who is of Ghanaian descent, was educated at the Quaker-founded Ackworth School in West Yorkshire before graduating from Nottingham with a BSc (Hons) in e-commerce and digital business in 2003. According to the record kept by the City regulator, the Financial Services Authority register, he started with UBS in 2006 as a trainee investment adviser.
Like many successful City workers, he lived far closer to the office than most people imagine. Until the spring he rented a ground-floor flat in a handsome redbrick building a few hundred yards' walk from the bank's London headquarters.
The Edwardian block, once a soup kitchen for the Jewish poor of east London but now an altogether more exclusive address, sits on the border of the City and Shoreditch. Philip Octave, who rented Adoboli his 3,000sq ft flat for £1,000 a week, was as puzzled by news of the arrest as anyone. "He was very well spoken and dressed very smartly," he said. "I can't believe [it]."
He described Adoboli as a good tenant and a "very nice guy; very polite". When he wasn't going back to Africa or travelling in the US or France, said Octave, Adoboli could be found wandering around the area and its bars. Others in the former soup kitchen found him equally engaging – and equally intriguing.
"He was my downstairs neighbour and I would come across him quite regularly," one resident of the block said. "He was a bizarre combination of a large [I thought] Nigerian man, and a man with a cut-glass English accent, obviously public-school educated."
He could not have been more charming or polite said the neighbour, who recalled that Adoboli, "an absolute character", had a habit of smoking cigarettes in his bare feet in the middle of the street because he wasn't allowed to smoke inside.
But like that part of London – where market and City traders rub shoulders in the local pubs – added the neighbour, Adoboli was also something of an enigma.
"It's very peculiar when you live in a place like that because there are a lot of people with mysterious jobs with the word hedge in it," he said. "I was interested in Kweku because he was a mixture of so many strange things. That kind of location attracts all sorts." He had been surprised to hear news of the arrest.
Four or five months ago, the neighbour said, Adoboli moved out of the block: some say to Stepney; others to Limehouse.
His former landlord and neighbour heard little about him until Thursday morning, when gaggles of photographers began to congregate outside.
The allegations of rogue trading could not have come at a worse time for UBS or the banking industry. After a disastrous performance during the 2008 banking crisis and a run-in with the US tax authorities, the Swiss bank was on the road to restoring its reputation.
Oswald Gruebel, the embattled UBS chief executive, acknowledged as much when in an email he urged staff to "stay focused on your clients, who are counting on you to guide them through these uncertain times".
He said: "We understand that you have already had to contend with unfavourable, volatile markets for some time now. While the news is distressing, it will not change the fundamental strength of our firm."
UBS will be most concerned about the impact the unfolding scandal might have on its secretive private banking arm, which caters to wealthy clients around the world.
While the $2bn loss can be absorbed by the bank, analysts at Goldman Sachs said: "The key area of damage in our view is reputational and extends beyond the investment bank, into UBS's private banking business."
The bank's logo, three old-fashioned looking keys, is intended to display "confidence, security and discretion". It might, like its alleged rogue trader, now also be seeking divine intervention. One of the last entries on Adoboli's Facebook page was said to be "need a miracle".
Sam Jones
Jill Treanor
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