#117 - Nick Leeson - I Lost £862 Million and Collapsed a Bank

Summary

The Peter McCormack Show — Episode #117

Guest: Nick Leeson

Title: “I Lost £862 Million and Collapsed a Bank”
Date: October 1, 2025

Overview

In this deeply candid episode, Peter McCormack sits down with Nick Leeson—the man whose unauthorized trades brought down Barings Bank in 1995, causing a loss of £862 million. Leeson recounts the harrowing spiral from a humble council estate in Watford to being one of the most infamous figures in modern financial history. Together, they explore the factors behind the collapse, the chaos of the trading floor, failures of oversight, psychological pressures, and the aftermath—including prison, rebuilding life, and family. Throughout, both host and guest engage with humor, empathy, and brutal honesty, drawing parallels to today's finance and crypto worlds.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nick Leeson’s Early Life and Career Origins

• Leeson's Background: Raised on a council estate in Watford, motivated by classic working class ambition, pressured for success by his mother.
  • “I grew up around Watford, grew up on a council estate… my mum would have always wanted me to do better than she had.” — Nick Leeson [02:55]
• Early Schooling: Strong at maths until a lack of proper teaching led him to fail his A-level, eliminating his university plans.
• Entry into Banking: Joined Coutts & Co by chance, later moving to Morgan Stanley and then Barings, with each step coinciding with the “Big Bang” era in the City of London.
• Early Warning Signs: Notorious lack of structure and management at Barings compared to previous employers.
  • “Barings was, you know, a lot of it was, you know, by the seat of your pants sort of stuff.” — NL [09:29]

2. How the Losses Began: Trading and the Culture of the Pit

• Start in Arbitrage: Tasked with trading Nikkei 225 futures between Tokyo and Singapore—an “arbitrage” job meant to be low risk.
  • “I was supposed to arbitrage between Singapore and Tokyo… buy in one location, selling the other.” — NL [12:19]
  • Peter relates to crypto traders who are familiar with exchange price differentials. [12:43]
• Pit Trading Dynamics: Old-school, hand-signal chaos; errors could happen quickly and needed rapid reconciliation.
  • “You both write out a little ticket… you’ve got to resolve those discrepancies within a 30-minute period.” — NL [17:04]
• First Loss: A £10,000 loss was the trigger; instead of “cutting” (closing) the loss as required, Leeson doubled down, driven by fear of failure.
  • “I’ve always had a huge fear of failure… success was the thing that motivated me and failure was always the one thing that I just couldn’t countenance.” — NL [22:35]

3. From Mistake to Catastrophe: The Spiral of Losses

• Doubling Down: Initial error ballooned as instead of admitting loss, Leeson increased the size and complexity of trades, often to “hide” previous losses.
  • “You described very well the position that I was in. I just didn’t do it four times. I probably did it 400 times.” — NL [45:19]
• Chasing Losses: Psychological descent into a gambler's mindset, losing perspective on the scale of losses as numbers grew.
• Accumulation Over Years:
  • £10k → $5m by Sep ‘92 → $20m by May ‘93 → Brief recovery (“got it all back”) → Losses resumed.
  • “By September of ‘92, it’s up to $5 million. So it’s accelerating quickly.” — NL [24:38]
  • “By late ‘93, early ‘94, I was probably 50% of the market.” — NL [27:47]
• The Point of No Return: Leeson often had half the market’s exposure, market volatility meant losses increased at a rate neither he nor the bank could sustain.

4. Why No One Stopped Him: Failures of Oversight & Control

• No Checks and Balances:

  • “At Barings, nobody did that position check for two and a half years.” — NL [28:04]
  • “If a position didn’t agree, the trader wasn’t allowed to trade until it did.... At Barings, nobody did that.” — NL [28:04]

• Auditor and Management Failure:

  • “Deloitte’s have just walked in the door, they’re going to do the year end audit.” — NL [31:48]
  • Auditors discovered a multi-million discrepancy but dismissed it as a “timing difference.”
  • Reliance on Leeson for explanations allowed consistent obfuscation and continued fraud, reinforced by organizational silos and lack of communication.

• The Confidence Trick:

  • “A lot of it was a confidence trick… as long as I was confident about what I was saying, they tended to accept it.” — NL [52:24]

Notable Quote

“There are simple checks and balances that should have exposed it, but just nobody was doing them.” — Nick Leeson [28:04]

5. The Collapse: The Final Days at Barings

• Mounting Demands for Cash:

  • "By the beginning of 1995, I was asking London for £650 million, which they’d given me.” — NL [26:24]
  • “They were borrowing the money in order to feed me in Singapore… that meant that if I, and I’ve met a guy… he’d say to me, ‘You can’t do that, we haven’t got any money left. It’s all in Singapore.’” — NL [48:23]

• Bank (and Regulator) Failed to Act:

  • “Every single day the treasurer has to send that [money transfer report] to the Bank of England… and when they asked what he was doing with those reports, his response is it was too far down in his in-tray.” — NL [54:14]

• The Moment of Discovery:

  • Tony Railton from London finally reconciles the accounts and confronts Leeson with an inexplicable shortfall.
  • “A plus B doesn’t equal C. Explain why it doesn’t equal C.” — Tony Railton to Leeson [00:00 / 55:56]

Leeson’s Reaction:

“I didn’t. I ran away.” — Nick Leeson [56:17]

6. On the Run and Arrest

• Flight from Singapore:
  • Details his escape to Kuala Lumpur, then Borneo, learning of the bank’s collapse on his birthday via the Asian Wall Street Journal. [60:39]
• Arrest in Frankfurt:
  • Surreal journey through multiple airports, seeing his face on every monitor and newspaper: “It’s just unbelievable.” — NL [65:03]
  • Arrested with wife for supposedly using false passports, ultimately extradited to Singapore after 9 months in German prison.

7. Prison, Reflection, and Aftermath

• Imprisonment:

  • “So I was extradited back to Singapore… four years, four months. You get a third off for good behavior.” — NL [67:13]
  • No sense of “relief” upon being caught; deeply anxious and fearful, especially in the dangerous confines of German prison.
  • “Absolutely, no, I’m shitting myself.” — NL [68:25]

• Reflection:

  • “You take a long hard look at yourself and you have to be really honest with yourself about things that happened… and you make changes.” — NL [71:05]
  • Loss of prospect for traditional business success; focus shifts to family, self-worth, and honesty.

• Compensation and Legal Repercussions:

  • Leeson received no financial benefit; proceeds from book and interviews seized by liquidators.
  • “If I earn any money, they’re entitled to it, up to £100 million.” — NL [82:22]
  • Rekindled life by public speaking, some media, and studying psychology after release.

• Impact on Others:

  • Most Barings retail and institutional clients recouped their funds; ING bought Barings and retained most staff.
  • Real damage done to colleagues’ personal careers, especially key executives like Peter Norris.
  • Reunion with former colleagues was emotionally difficult: “You could see the damage that did to Peter. And that was difficult to take.” — NL [77:02]

8. Fatherhood, Legacy, and Moving On

• Personal Growth:
  • Now values being a parent over material success; finds pride in his children’s character and achievements.
  • “A lot of my success these days comes from being a parent and looking at how my children are doing.” — NL [72:11]
• Relationship with the Past:
  • Mentions days go by without thinking about Barings; primary focus is on family, not reputation.
  • “None of it hurts anymore.” — NL [86:51]
• Advice to Next Generation:
  • Open with children about past; emphasizes doing the right thing and asking for help.
  • “Always do the right thing, right? If you find, if you’re struggling with something, come and ask me… I’m always going to be there to help you.” — NL [89:53]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Avoidance:

  • “If you’ve got somebody chasing you for money… you might get the letter in the post and you throw it in the bin without even looking at it because you know what it’s going to say.” — NL [29:32]

• On Organizational Failure:

  • “Nothing was followed up… Bit like, to bring it into the crypto world, bit like FTX.” — NL [51:29]

• On Being a Good Trader vs. a Gambler:

  • “I’m sure you’re now not a trader, you’re a gambler.” — Peter McCormack [40:24]

• On Parenting:

  • “I think you use those things to empower your children.” — NL [89:53]

• Comic Relief:

  • “Did you get a bonus?” — Peter McCormack [73:25]
  • “No. We can get there if you want. But, yes—a sore point, I know… No, I’m joking.” — NL [73:26]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Nick’s Early Life & Ambition: [02:55–06:55]
• First Steps in Banking / Barings Culture: [06:55–10:57]
• How the Trading Losses Started: [12:05–14:00]
• Pit Trading Explained: [16:44–18:47]
• First Loss & Psychology of Chasing: [19:13–23:52]
• Spiral of Losses & Doubling Down: [23:52–27:47]
• How Was No One Stopping This?: [28:04–31:47]
• Auditor Misses & Covering Up: [31:47–35:37]
• No One to Confide In: [35:35–37:00]
• Market Turns, All Is Briefly Forgiven: [39:58–41:28]
• Why Barings Collapsed: [51:29–56:02]
• The Run and Arrest: [57:59–67:04]
• Prison & Life Reflection: [67:05–71:05]
• Consequences for Self & Others: [73:01–77:02]
• Family and Legacy: [86:39–93:33]

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Final Thoughts & Tone

Throughout the conversation, Leeson and McCormack maintain an open, sometimes irreverent, yet always honest tone, making space for laughter amid hard truths. Leeson is forthright about his responsibility, the absence of oversight that enabled him, and the devastating ripple effects—not least on himself, his colleagues, and his family. He’s moved from defining himself by business “success” to centering his life around parenting and integrity. The discussion is as much a lesson in human frailty and institutional failure as it is a captivating story about high finance gone horribly wrong.

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“There are always warning signs… but nobody sees them until it’s too late. If I’d been checked—if there’d been proper controls—it would have stopped. Instead, the hole got deeper and I just kept digging.” — Nick Leeson

Episode prompts a Part Two, covering 2008 crisis, prison with cancer, and more reflections.

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Transcript

[A]

So I lost 862 million pound through my illegal trading in Singapore and that caused the collapse of the bank. I left Singapore on 23rd February, 1995. That was the day I fled Singapore. So they'd sent somebody from London, a guy called Tony Railton, to look at what was going on in Singapore. So they were finally getting close to this reconciliation. He didn't do it for the first two and a half weeks, but then he did a reconciliation. He came to me with a simple piece of paper like you, you've got in front of you. You know, A plus B doesn't equal C. Explain why it doesn't equal C.

[B]

This episode is brought to you by our lead sponsor and massive legends iron, the largest Nasdaq listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Now, they're not just powering the bitcoin network, they're also providing cutting edge computer resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. Now, my boy Danny and I have been working with their founders, Dan and Will, for quite some time now, and we've always been super impressed with their values, especially their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power. So if you're interested in mining bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. And so you can find out [e-mail], which is ir.com that is iron.com the.

[C]

Most powerful iPhone break ever. Breakthrough battery life.

[A]

Oh, God.

[C]

Our best display ever with ceramic Shield two on the front. There's an orange one, though. It's quite nice. Oh, view pricing. Hold on, where are we at? I can't see. IPhone 17 Pro P grand. Yeah. Look at this weird kind of image they're using. That's the thing is, it's like, I mean, I'll change it because of that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

You said you'll set it up and then what happens two minutes after you set it up? Nothing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Nothing has changed.

[A]

Nothing's different.

[C]

Nothing has changed. Right. Nick, great to meet you. So, funny thing doing this to this job of this podcast. Every now and again, someone follows you on Twitter and you're like, I know that person. I know that name.

[B]

I was really sad.

[C]

I wanted my son here because I wanted him to hear your story. Unfortunately, unwell. Right. But even Kurt here doesn't know your story. And I've mentioned this week to a couple of people. I'm interviewing Nick Leon and it's two responses and I either. Who? Yeah, like, no way.

[A]

Yeah, that's. That's the usual response.

[C]

I don't Even know where to start. Okay, where should we start? Where should we start? Well, look, so people know what we're going to talk about. Tell, tell people what kind of what happened and then we'll, and I'm, I'm sorry because you've probably told this story a million times. I want to hear it from you.

[A]

Yeah, no, I suppose like I was, I was telling it to a certain degree yesterday, so. And that's what I do for a living these days. You know, I speak for a living, so I'm, I'm certainly not upset by the request. I, you know, grew up around Watford, grew up on a council estate in Watford. Was always really motivated by success. I suppose I had some very, you know, classic working class ethos sort of instilled in me from an early age. My mum would have always wanted me to do better than she had, you know, have a bit more money than she did, a bit more success and a better life really. You know, and it was that classic transition from working class to middle class or, or wherever you can get to. So there was always, you know, I kind of remember being 8 or 9 years old in junior school and being ahead of the class because there was always that need to succeed and be successful. And it was, it was driven into me from an early age. Didn't do quite so well at senior school. You know, I think we all sort of get involved with other things and, you know, did well at O level, A levels. I, I, I always say I very spectacularly failed my maths A level. So banking was the only career for me. But that's, you know, it's weird, isn't it, when you look back and you, you know, there's so many warning signs, I suppose that, that people should have up to. But no, I was really good at maths at O level, Got an A at O level and then the teacher that was. I went to a very good school. I was reading the other day, I went to a school called Parmaters.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Which is now. I was reading the other day that it's the, it's the most oversubscribed school in, in Hertfordshire. So it was always very good. Then it was, it used to be a grammar school in Bethnal Green and then it moved to Hertfordshire. You know, obviously they were closing the school in, in Bethnal Green. So I was the second year that it was there and yeah, it was a good time. And the deputy head was the, a guy called Mr. Francis. I'm sure he won't appreciate the name check but the, the he, he was my maths teacher and I had a lot of respect for him, really enjoyed his classes. He was a bit, he, he was a bit of, you know, they, it was dictatorial, I suppose. You know, he was one of those guys who used to go around with the ruler and smack you over the head or on the hand or something. If you've got a very old school.

[C]

I think we should bring it back.

[A]

Yeah, well, no, I do as well. You know, I've tried it with my son. No, I haven't tried it with my son. I won't say that.

[C]

You know, I remember once, I remember once with my son, I was trying to get him ready for school and he was being a. And I remember I came a little, little whack, a little whack on the knee and hit me back. I was like, fair enough.

[B]

And I think that's probably.

[C]

Yeah, the last time, the only time. Yeah, we've had a couple of little.

[A]

Scraps, but yeah, no, no, my youngest is 20, 21 now. He's 21 last week.

[C]

So my son's age.

[A]

Oh, is it?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. So he's never. No, he's never been smacked, I don't think anyway. But yeah, no, so it was that sort of environment and then he got sick and so he, you know, we had relief teachers for a year and I just didn't bother going. So that was the reason why I failed the Mass A level. And then trying to work out what you're going to do with your life and you aspirations of going to university. And then all of a sudden somebody said to me, I'm applying to Coutts and Company, which was the Queens bank at the time. You know, there was, I think there were 11 or 12 offices around London, a lot of them in the West End, a couple in the city and I applied and you know, no rhyme or reason, didn't want to be a banker and. But just everybody else was applying. I thought, okay, I'll give it a go. So I think there was about 30, 40 people applied from our. I think there was a handful, no more than five that were given interviews and then they offered me a job and nobody else was offered a job.

[C]

Amazing.

[A]

Yeah, it's weird. I mean it was just a basic, you know, it was a basic interview and then there was an aptitude test which was English and maths. Somehow I managed to pass that one, so. And then they offered me a job in, in Lombard street, so. Right in the heart of the city. Again, you know, I didn't choose which one of the branches it was that I was going to go to could have been Cavendish Square or one of those sort of areas out west and very private banking related. Whereas this was town clearing. It was, you know, moving the big money around with the checks. Used to go to the clearinghouse every day and swap those sort of things around. But it coincided with the big bang era. So you know it was. I started working the city in 1985, Big Bang was 1987. So there was, you know, you've got this maelstrom really of opportunity. You know the lots of new banks come into the city, new jobs being created. So you know, you'd get off the tube at bank and you'd pick up one of those magazines that they used to hand out years ago, was it called Timeout maybe And it'd just be, you know, back to back jobs and so you could get a new job really easy and if you wanted to progress up that ladder it's quite easy to do. One of the accounts I looked after at the time when I was at Morgan Stanley, sorry Coutts, was Morgan Stanley, the big American investment bank. So they offered me a job in the old Commercial Union Building just by Leadenall Market. So I went there, worked there for about a year still in the city and then they kind of migrated over to the West End. So I moved over there working in a department called Liability Management which again clearly didn't learn anything in later life as we get to that part of the story because there was no. Well there was a lot of liability both for me and the bank and then I was headhunted. So prior to that I'd been doing a bit of work in futures and options and specifically Japanese futures and options. So Nikki. 225 and topics it's quite specialized, not particularly complex. I know that whenever people talk about some of these products they describe them as complex. They're not, you know, if you know, they're quite vanilla. And was headhunted to Barings. You know Barings was looking for somebody that was experienced in that area Bearing. So Barings is two organizations. You've got the 233 year old merchant bank which was, you know, very blue blooded and then in 1985 they that there was an offshoot called Bare Insecurities which was set up by Christopher Heath, Andrew Bayliss and Ian Martin and was based in Port Soken street in, in the City but very big in Japanese warrants. That's where they made most of their money. But Then was expanding into other areas as well. So the big tiger economies out in Southeast Asia, you know, they had a small department that used to do UK equities and stuff like that, but very much expanding into that. So I joined Barings. Very different to Morgan Stanley, which was a very efficiently run organization, a lot of money invested into it, legal and things like that. Whereas Barings was, you know, a lot of it was, you know, by the seat of your pants sort of stuff. That was very apparent very, very early on, you know, settling Nikkei 225 trades. We used to do it off a PC system. That would work some days, it wouldn't work the other days we'd buy off off the shelf stuff. Rolf and Nolan, which was a big settlement vendor at the time, IT vendor at the. OR software vendor at the time, that didn't work correctly. You know that. Now that's the de facto go to for over the last 20 years or so. But it didn't work for Nikkei 225 futures and options. So, yeah, it was, it was an interesting time. You know, as, as we, as we.

[C]

Mentioned, we should probably. Let's tell people where we're heading.

[A]

Well, yeah, yeah.

[C]

So you, you are one of the people who has a moment in their life where you're in the eye of the storm. You're essentially the most talked about person in the world at that moment.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I remember because I've got this.

[C]

Distinct memory of seeing you, I think you're arrested in German.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Coming off a plane.

[B]

That's what I remember.

[C]

And that's where I remember hearing the story.

[B]

That's my vague memory.

[C]

Because what year would that have been?

[A]

That would have been 1995, so I.

[C]

Would have been 17.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And I just distinctly remember that.

[C]

I just. I don't think you had any hair then, did you?

[A]

No, I had a little bit.

[B]

A little bit, but that's what I remember.

[C]

And so what we're going to talk about, essentially a huge bank failure.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And my failure.

[C]

Yeah, of course.

[A]

As well.

[C]

But the explain just, just so people understand the context. Then we'll, then we'll tell this, we'll get you to tell the story. But what was, what was the size of the failure? What essentially happened? And then we'll go back.

[A]

Yeah, So I lost 862 million pounds through my illegal trading in Singapore and that caused the collapse of the bank.

[C]

It happened in any of us.

[A]

Yeah, no, like going back to that. Palmer.

[C]

Legal trading.

[A]

No illegal trading. Illegal trading. So you know, I was employed to trade. That's what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to arbitrage between Singapore and Tokyo.

[C]

What does that mean for people?

[A]

Just buy in one location, selling the other? You know, I mean, obviously you do a lot in the crypto world and you know, I regularly see bits and pieces where you can buy on one exchange and you can sell on another.

[C]

So, so people understand arbitrage means you would hold money on two different exchanges. There's a difference in price. Yeah, you would buy and sell to take that spread.

[A]

Yeah. And it's very, it's very short term. So like between the Nikkei 225 in Singapore and Japan, you know, it exists for, you know, a second or two, you know, so you have to buy in one location and sell in the other almost instantaneously. And I'm sure, you know, if there are those opportunities in crypto, I'm sure it exists for, you know, a similarly a small amount of time because, you know, everybody's trying to take that sort of edge out of the market because it's, it's not free. It's not, it's kind of, kind of free money. If you're good at it, it's free, good at it and quick enough to do it and you have the capacity to do that. It effectively is free money. But, you know, there's a bit of execution risk, I suppose is, is where, is where the danger lies in, in trying to do that. But I was obviously doing that in size between the two different exchanges and then, you know, got caught badly, you know, and, and then I'm left with that dilemma of what do I do with that trade that I've been caught on.

[B]

I want to talk to you about one of my sponsors, Incogni, and that means we're going to talk about the weird world of spam. And I don't just mean those spam emails that you get day after day from companies you never heard of and companies you've never signed up to. I'm also talking about those spam phone.

[C]

Calls you get from those people who.

[B]

Seem to know a little bit too much about you, trying to get your bank details. It's all a bit creepy right now. This all comes from the world of data brokerage. There are companies out there collecting your data, building profiles and sending that data to anyone who wants it, which is why when one of those scammers phoned you up, they seem to know everything about you. Now I've tried, I've tried myself to get off These lists, try to get off the phone lists, try to get off the email list. I unsubscribe from every one of these emails that comes in. But this game of Whack a Mole, it just never ends. And so this is where Incogni comes in. They do all the hard work for.

[C]

You, they reach out to these companies.

[B]

And they will get you legally removed from these lists. And I know because the last time they sponsored my show I signed up and I didn't take the free option that they offered me.

[C]

I wanted to pay for it, I.

[B]

Wanted to see if you get value for money. And they removed me from 79 data broker lists. And so I've stayed on, I've stayed a subscriber and I have seen a massive decrease in the number of emails and phone calls I've been getting. So it's a great service. I recommend you check it out. If you're sick of this like I was, please head over to incogni.com forward/peter and sign up. If you use the code Peter, you will get a lovely 60 discount. So that's incogni.com forward/peter.

[C]

What were you caught out on what happened?

[A]

Well, there's so on the arbitrage side, you know, obviously I'd bought in one location, wasn't, hadn't been able to get the sale away in the other in, in Japan, if it was Japan, that, that, that it, that way that it was going and that's how it, the, the losses started to build. The, the initial genesis if you like is, you know, we were. The Nikkei 225 was trading at a record high at the time. It was up around 3940 000. So you just back, back to those sort of levels at the moment. And the market started to fall and, and the circuit breakers were kicking in in Japan so there was no trade in J market and all that business shifted to Singapore. So Singapore went from trading 2,3000 contracts a day to trading 20 to 25,000 contracts a day. And it wasn't ready for it. You know, it was a very, you know, it wasn't one of the leading exchanges of the world. Didn't do a lot of great, a great deal of volume, didn't do, didn't have a great deal of open interest. So it wasn't ready for this and the, it wasn't ready for it. So everything was open and outcry. So you buy and sell using your, yeah, hand signals that were going into the pit and coming back out the pit when they were confirmed. So very different from getting an instant confirmation off of your computer screen.

[C]

Oh, so you were trading in the pit?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So you, you know, you both write out a little ticket so, you know, buy at this price and then you give that to your runner who goes and inputs it into a computer. The other person who sold is doing exactly the same on their side of it and, you know, within 30 minutes the two are supposed to match and then you have a trade.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And if they don't match, you've got a problem and you have to solve it. It might be that, you know, you thought you were trading with me, but I thought I was trading with the person behind you. Because it's all line of sight in terms of, you know, you're confirming by hand signals, but you're 20, 30ft away. And so there's sometimes that misconception. You might think you traded at 2, I might think we traded at 3. And you've got to resolve those discrepancies and you've got to do that within a 30 minute period.

[C]

The pit always looks fun.

[A]

Yeah, it's like a sport. It's gladiatorial, I think. Yeah. Now, there's always a bit of jostling, a bit of, you know, sometimes there can be a bit of fighting and if somebody, if there's only one person with the trade and there's 200 of you who want to get filled on that trade, you've got to get yourself to the front, be seen that, you know, there's camaraderie within that as well. You know, people will look after certain people within it. And so you've got all of that sort of going off at the same time. It's noisy.

[C]

Does it still exist?

[A]

No, no, no. They've all, they've pretty much all gone. I think you might find a, you might find a commodity exchange every, you know, in a couple of different locations, but it's gone because it was, you know, certainly in Singapore, it wasn't very transparent and, you know, the move to screen trading and doing everything on, on, you know, more technically, if you like, is, has been, you know, one of the purposes to do, to do that is to aid that transparency so that everybody can see what's going on and nobody's got a competitive advantage. Whereas, you know, I remember being in The Pit with J.P. morgan and J.P. morgan would always walk in with a big order and sometimes you get a tap on the back or the back side which says, get out of the way.

[C]

Right, okay.

[A]

Because they're going to sell and they're going to cremate everybody and then once they finish, the market will get back to normality. But it was a size of order type scenario. You know, there's no. And. And you needed that relationship with JP Morgan to get the tap on the back and, and that used to happen in London, on Life, you know, it happened in Singapore. So there was all those sort of things that were involved with it as well. But.

[C]

So what was the size of that first loss?

[A]

10,000 pound.

[C]

It's not that.

[A]

No, it's not big at all.

[C]

Successful trader before, you've done well within there.

[A]

Yeah, yes and no. Right. I, I mean it happened early, it happened early during my time in Singapore, so that was really my first foray onto the trading floor in an open outcry environment. So, you know, I'm the first to admit that I was out of my depth at that stage. Because you're dealing, you know, I'm managing for the first time as well, you know, I'm managing a team of 10 to 15 people, you know, of which eight or nine of them are on the trading floor and you know, I'm not up to it. I. Everybody's my friend, you know, I'm not ruthless enough. If somebody makes a mistake, I'm not admonishing them, I'm not giving them a hard time, you know, I'm trying to help them through that process. You know, I remember when I was one of the order fillers that I had in Singapore, George, he, he was going through a divorce at the time. So the first thought that pops into my mind is you can stay at mine for a few, few weeks while you, you're sorting yourself out. So everything was too close.

[C]

10K doesn't seem like a big loss.

[A]

No. But it gets bigger quickly.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So because I don't do the right.

[C]

Thing, what are you meant to do when you make.

[A]

Yeah, you cut the trade immediately. So you crystallize what the loss is and then you refer that up to the, to the management within the organization and I did some of that.

[C]

And what would they normally do in.

[A]

A situation like that for 10 grand? There's not going to be, you know, there's going to be a slight wrap on the knuckles. Maybe that, that'd be it.

[C]

Because you're not. The kind of trading you're doing, there's not meant to be losses, there's always.

[A]

Losses because you're always going to have that mismatch and you're going to have those disputes that are going to have to be resolved, but they're going to be tiny, but they expect them to be resolved immediately.

[C]

Part of business?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's a function of doing the business, but obviously there's a protocol that you have to go through. And the very next morning that's what I did. I went in to see Simon Jones who ran the operations department in Singapore. I said, look, this is the situation. It's a 10 grand loss. Simon wasn't in the futures and options world, he wasn't in the trading world, but he was head of the operations side of it. He said, look, I don't really want to know. Can you refer it to Andrew Bayliss in London? So Andrew's, you know, one of the founders of Barren securities, very experienced trading side of the business, you know, held in a lot of esteem by everybody within the organization. Bit scary. And you know, I'm sat there and I've got this dilemma in Singapore. It's 8 o' clock in the morning or it's even earlier. It's probably 7 o' clock in the morning in Singapore. So what's that? You know, midnight in the UK might be 1am in the morning. So I've got this dilemma. Market's going to open in two minutes. Do I cut this immediately? Because I've still got the position. We didn't discover this until 3, 3 or 4 in the morning. So the first thing I've got to do is cut it. So you're looking, so you're looking at the level that it was last night and then you've got the opening calls coming through on the on floor the next morning and, and you know, like, maybe I'm short at this level and you know, somebody's bidding it up and it's getting, it's getting worse and worse and worse. So 10 grand's going to 15 to 20 or whatever is you seeing that price move up and I didn't cut it.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

So now I'm more complicit in the error because I don't have the scope to do that.

[C]

I don't think you cut it.

[A]

Failure. I like, I've always had a huge fear of failure. You know, as we said at the beginning, success was the thing that motivated me and failure was always the one thing that I just couldn't countenance. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't put my hand up. And I think that came to like it's an instant decision, right? The market, the market's not waiting for me to make. All right, all right. Nick, can you make up your mind what you want to do? The market's racing away and it's getting worse and worse and worse and then you're too far into it. And in those early stages, you know, 10 grand going to 20 grand going to 50 grand would have stung like hell at that point. You know, in latter years, when this is getting bigger and the position is bigger and the losses are getting out of control, you know, the market, I'm going from a 5 million loss to a 15 million loss. And it's just, it's different because it's not in those early stages. And it's a number that's damaging, but it's not smarting as much in terms of the difficulty that you're having with it because you've kind of gone along this journey where. And I hate to say that the numbers have lost significance, but they have to a certain degree. You know, you're just. You've dug yourself into this hole and all you want to do is dig your way out of it.

[C]

But so, so, so how bad did that trade on its own go?

[A]

It's a great question and I'm not sure that it ever. Because I just started to double down.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Because that, so I'm not sure that I actually closed that, you know, because I read that. That's a clever question because I, I'm just trying to think if I ever specifically closed that trade, and I probably didn't.

[C]

Well, how long, how long was the whole period from the first 10k loss to I need to go on the run?

[A]

Yeah. Two and a half years.

[C]

Two and a half years, roughly.

[A]

It might be. It might be a little bit more than two and a half years.

[C]

So two and a half years and so, but that, so that, but is it all. It's not all one trade. It's you new trades to try and.

[A]

Yeah, it kind of, it changes during that period. So like to give it. To give you some of the numbers chronologically, by September of 9. So. So we're talking now about June, July 92. By September of 92, it's up to $5 million. So it's accelerating quickly.

[C]

And is this because every single. Every trade went against you or some.

[B]

You got a bit back?

[A]

Let me give you an idea. The Nikkei 225 went from 39,000 down to 17 over this period. So the, the market is going in one direction and I'm against that trend all the way. So I was, I was long. The market and the market just kept going down and down and down. I'm increasing the exposure and the leverage all of the time, because then I start trading Nikkei 225 options. So I'm selling options to receive the premium to hide the loss in the 5, 8 account. So you've got this exposure that's just increasing dynamically as we go through, you know, new levels. You know, the market halved over that period. More than halved over that period.

[C]

Is this. That the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay.

[A]

Exactly. Yeah, it's one. It's one of those. And, And I don't. Maybe, maybe it wasn't irrational, it was me being irrational. But the, you know, the market went down to nine after that, I think, even down to eight. And so it's recovered itself all the way back up to. But there was a, you know, there was a massive earthquake. Yeah, there was an earthquake. That was. I, Yeah, I, I think by that stage my position had just got too big. I wasn't able to manage it, you know, and anything I'd borrowed or I'd asked London for 650 million pound by that stage, which they'd give.

[C]

Hold on, hold on. We've got to go back a couple.

[A]

Of sets before we get 62.

[B]

Okay, so.

[C]

So you're. So when you start to get into the millions, are. Are you in autopilot or are you going home sweating, thinking, holy.

[A]

You're always going. You're always going home sweating. It's like a Jekyll and Hyde type of existence. You know, I've got my, you know, my wife, who's in Singapore at the time as well, you know, she would have been going to the gym and doing whatever she was doing during the day. And you've got to come back to that so that, you know, you've got to. You've got to have a certain degree of normality in that relationship. But then when you, you turn up on the trading floor, you're dealing with the shit that you've got to deal with every single day and it's getting worse and the market's going lower and, you know, you can't avoid it, right. You know that you're long, the market's gone down another 100 points. That's going to increase your. Increase your loss.

[C]

There's a no point that you thought, actually, this is the way the market's going. I can double down but go short.

[A]

I think by the time that I was thinking along those sort of lines, the market didn't have the capacity for me to flip that position. My position had just got so big. So let me give you some examples so that people, you know, possibly understand it. By, you know, late 93, early 94, I was probably 50 of the market. Jesus.

[C]

How does.

[B]

Sorry, I'm not.

[C]

I mean, you've probably had a few people laugh when you tell the story.

[B]

Because it's just so.

[C]

I think some people or myself are surprised that you were able to hide it. There isn't checks and balances in place that exposes.

[A]

Oh, no, look, there are simple checks and balances that should have exposed it, but just nobody was doing them. And that goes back to, you know, the earlier comment that I made about bearings not being particularly well organized, not being particularly well set up in these sort of areas. And, you know, the simple thing that you do every single day, and I'm sure you do it when you're, when you're trading or when you're, when you're accumulating positions and everything, you check that the confirmation's there and that the positions agree. So. And nobody did that. So if you. The first thing that you do at Morgan Stanley, and I used to do this myself, is you check that the traders positions agree with the broker or with the exchange. And I used to have to do that by 7am in the morning. And if a position didn't agree, the trader wasn't allowed to trade until it did. And that was very strictly enforced at Barings. Nobody did that position check for two and a half years. Obviously I did it and I did it for a while, looking at it. And, you know, sometimes I used to. There used to be a statement put on my desk which was for the five eights account, which was the illegal account that the, the trades were going in. And so in the beginning, the, you know, you'd get the statement there and it might be one or two pages. You know, these are your new positions. This is your open position. This is the P and L type of thing. And you'd have a look at it. And in the early days, I genuinely look at it and try to think, well, how can I extricate myself from the situation? Slowly the statement gets bigger and bigger and bigger to the stage and it hits a point where you're, you know, it's so forlorn and you don't want to. It's like all of those classics, classic things when people do, when they find themselves in a difficult situation, whether it's health, finance or anything like that, you know, if you've got somebody chasing you for money or whatever, Else, you know, you might get the letter in the post and you throw it in the bin without even looking at it because you know what it's going to say. And so I got got a bit that way with the statement. So the statement would be there on my desk. I just throw it in, I just.

[C]

Throw it into the drawer.

[A]

Didn't even want to look at it.

[B]

Red letters.

[A]

Yeah, didn't want to look at it. That's it, you know, I'll deal with it another day. And slowly it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's classic avoidance in, in that regard.

[C]

But is there also no one asking you? So they're lit, they're allowing the trade to stay open, but surely at some point they think, well, we want you to close the. Can a trade not be forced to close so they can recoup their money?

[A]

Yeah, yeah it could. But they were continuing to give me money to pay as margin. So I was coming up with these cock and bull stories about why I needed more money. And it was typically for some of the other parts of the business that we were doing in Singapore, you know, a bit of give up trading where we're passing the trade to another broker. There was a, a customer who was a, he was an actual customer, he wasn't fictitious, but he wasn't trading in the volume that I was doing in the illegal accounts. And so London, you know, I would phone up the head of treasury who'd been in treasury for 20 years, right. He was an experienced treasurer and I'd say, well it happened. So if I go back a little bit. So we, I mentioned already in September 1992 the loss was $5 million. So up until that point I'd been posting a very simple journal entry where I'd credit the 58 account, which is where the loss was, and I would debit the Commission Income account, which is where we were earning some commission. By September of 1992. The commission income account's got no money left, right. So I can't do that. Deloitte's have just walked in the door, they're going to do the year end audit. So the year end was September of 1992. The partners there guy called Charlie Ma from Deloitte's in Singapore, a couple of junior auditors who were there to do the stuff. And I've got a $5 million loss and it's the 30th of September and.

[C]

Should that be a game up situation?

[A]

That's an absolute game up situation. So you know, they're they're about to start their work and, you know, last minute I phone up the Treasury Department. Markets have been quite volatile during this period. Obviously the market is going down and down and down. So I phoned up Tony Hawes, who was the. The head treasurer in London, and I said, look, Tony, I need $5 million. And he obviously his first question was, what do you need it for? And I said, it's market volatility. The exchange is looking for additional margin, so it's just about believable. Tony wouldn't be experienced in futures and options. So he gives in and he sends me $5 million. But what he does is he sends me, obviously he instructs that on the 30th of September, it doesn't arrive until the 1st of October, I've got to journal it on the 30th of September, which I do, and then the auditors are in and I don't really think about it again. I'm not thinking that there's a day pass before the money arrives, but when you look at the Board of Banking Supervision report, which was written after the collapse of the bank, they make the point and they ask the auditors, or they go through the audit records, and so the auditors have found out, found at the time when they're doing the audit, that there's a discrepancy of $5 million between the group accounts in London and the group accounts in Singapore. And they've put that discrepancy down to a foreign exchange discrepancy. They've not asked anybody, this was of their own doing, but they've decided this 5 million dollar difference that exists between London and Singapore, which they can't really work out. It's a timing difference.

[C]

Did you a favor?

[A]

Did me absolute favor.

[C]

Because in the end.

[A]

Well, no, yeah, yeah. It depends on which way. Yeah. Maybe now, today I'm thinking, well, you know, I could have got another job somewhere and I might be. I might be working somewhere else. There's a funny story, right? There's a friend of mine who I started with, I was at Morgan Stanley at the same time, so we both spent a bit of time in Japan working for Morgan Stanley and I was at 155Bishopsgate yesterday, which is next door to ICAP, which is one of the big broke, bigger brokers in the UK these days. I'm not going to mention his name on here because he wouldn't appreciate it, but we were both in Japan at the same time, both same age, embarking on our careers. He was in A different part of the firm. I was about to say what part of the firm he was in, and people would work out who he was. And, you know, we used to spend a lot of time of our, a lot of time together in Japan, socializing and the like and going out and having a laugh. Our careers took very different paths. You know, he was the youngest managing director at Morgan Stanley. I went to jail, you know, and that's the stark reality of some of the choices that you make. And again, you know, the audit one there is a. Is a stark reality. It would have put me back into line because I would have been, you know, like I was pushing the boundaries all the time and those boundaries were getting further and further apart. And we were talking earlier about boundaries and politics and stuff in life. And, you know, it is important that boundaries are in place in lots of different scenarios. And there were boundaries at bearings, but I'm always pushing them. You know, I'm getting a phone call from somebody in London asking me a particular question, and I'm thinking on my feet like this. None of this was pre planned or premeditated. I'd get a phone call from somebody in compliance and they'd be asking me about a specific thing that happened that day. And I'd give them the first answer that came into my head and they'd believe it and they'd go away. And I might get a phone call from somebody else who'd ask me a similar question, get a completely different answer, but they, as long as they didn't share that information, and that was a key part of it. Everybody was operating in silos.

[C]

But were you confiding in anyone?

[A]

No.

[C]

So you carried this all the way on your own?

[A]

Yeah, I didn't say anything to anybody until the day that you saw me. Well, probably a couple of days before you saw me arriving at Frankfurt airport.

[C]

So. So take, take me from 5 million to asking for 650 million. What happened in that gap?

[A]

Well, you're. It's, it's accumulating.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Right. So you're by May of 19. So now I'm selling options. And, you know, sometimes when I'm talking to a trading crowd, people say to me, well, what was the strategy? And. And I said, look, you know, you, you're not getting what I was doing. It was a cash play, right. I needed cash to bring the account balance back down to zero. So I'm selling the most expensive stuff that I can find because I need to sell less of it to get the amount of money that I require to bring that account balance down to zero to buy time to buy yourself a month, effectively, because the options, they expire on a monthly basis. So, you know, January options expire in February. I'm going to crystallize a loss and I'm going to have to sell February options, and then February options are going to expire. That's going to crystallize another loss and I'm selling March options. So you're just chasing your tail and you're postponing the realization of the loss. As much as you know, for me personally, what I was doing throughout that whole period was postponing the realization of my own failure.

[B]

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[C]

The hope that the market comes back at some point?

[A]

That's definitely the hope. Whether I could give you a rational business decision behind that would be difficult because don't forget, you're increasing the exposure all the time. So if you see the January options expire and I'm selling these all of the time, right? So the options would be priced in terms of volatility, right? So the volatility when I started selling options was 55%. By the time I stopped selling options, volatility was 7, right? So I've pushed, I'm pushing the price lower and lower and lower. So it's self defeating at the same time because as I'm pushing the price lower, I've got to sell more of them, which means that I'm increasing the exposure because I've gone from selling 5,000 options to hide my loss to now selling 50,000 options to hide a similar amount of loss. But I've taken on so much more leverage, so much more exposure that a slight tick in the market is gonna, is gonna absolutely terrorize me. And that's eventually what happened. But you know, from September, from The loss being $5 million, you get through to May of 1993, I'm sure Nikkei 225 around 19,000. I think it was maybe a little bit higher. Short straddles, which means that basically you're selling puts and calls. So you don't want the market to go anywhere. You know, if the market goes massively in either direction, you're really exposed. You're going to be taken out on one side of the trade. So you want to it to stay fairly level around that sort of. And you've got this, you know, volatility or premium decay that happens. So whatever I sold it at, it might be worth zero. That's your ideal situation. That happened in May of 1993. So I've gone from a, you know, probably a $20 million loss at that stage and I've got it all back. The whole thing, Whole thing. And I've got a credit in the account.

[C]

So close out.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Got away with it.

[A]

Yeah, but you're, you're far cleverer than me. I'm stupid.

[C]

Or was it as like, hold on, because over what period did you go from 20 million lost to a credit?

[A]

So. So it's 5 million in September. I can't give you the exact details, but it's 5 million loss in September 92. It's a credit in May of 93.

[C]

So I'm going to assume that you're now not a trader, you're a gambler. And because you've had that turnaround, you think you can go further and make a shit ton.

[A]

I think there's a part of that, but there's a stage before. Right, so you're back. I went home that weekend and it was party central. Right. That's my life can start again. And on the Monday morning I go back into work and orders are going in. Not all of the errors were mine. Right. Not all of the position is mine. But if somebody on the floor is making an error, it's easier for me to put that into the 58 account rather than, you know, make a big deal about it. It's not something I want to highlight because, you know, that's going to highlight an inconsistency within the business. So on the Monday morning you're placing orders back into the Floor and we're getting errors coming back and they go straight back into the five eights account. So the whole store. Sorry story starts again. I know. And you know, we can do.

[C]

Some nice sushi.

[A]

I don't even think it was that good. I think we were at the Hard Rock Cafe in Singapore or saying dancing, dancing on the tables or whatever used to go on in the Hard Rock Cafes. But yeah, that was the limit of it. And on the Monday, you know, I was too close to the people. Lack of management expertise wasn't ruthless enough. Still not ruthless now, you know, 30 odd years later. And yeah, I just made that stupid decision and it went back into the Five8 account and it was no big deal because I've just got out of this situation and I'll do it again.

[C]

So, so, so from 20 to credit to, to where again, back to 20.

[A]

Well on, on that day.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

No, no, no, no. It would have been much smaller than that. But, but the same, the same, same mindset, same sort of, you know, like the worst type of gambler is. And a trader certainly as well, you know, for people who get themselves into a difficult situation when they're trading is somebody who chases and you know, like with hindsight you can see that I was chasing throughout all of that period.

[C]

I've done it twice myself.

[A]

Have you.

[B]

I'm a terrible trader, right.

[C]

So I don't, but I don't actually trade bitcoin or crypto. I did for a period, right. I turned, you can read the story online.

[B]

When I first got In, I turned.

[C]

34, I think it was 35,000 pound in January 2017 to about 1.2 million, 1.3 million by about Christmas and then I think it was by March or April of 18 down to 60 grand. So. But my, my actual two things I always remember, that's why I don't trade. So when I first got into bitcoin I was actually trading CFDs on Plus500 and I knew nothing. But I used to watch the charts and it would go up a bit and then down, then up a bit and then down and then it would turn and do the same. But it was always in these little peaks and troughs. So I just. Not much. I used to just follow these peaks and troughs and I was doing. When Tesla first started to blow up, right? I did really well and I would just sit there doing it at the end of the. So I'd go, I'd go long, short, long, short, long, short. And I did all right. I made a few Quid here or there. Not, not a lot. We're not talking your numbers, we're talking thousands of pounds. But at the time I was working in advertising in London.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Nice little bit of pocket money. And I remember once I was get, I got the train from London down to Dorset to my ex wife's parents and I'm on the train with my phone connected to my laptop doing it.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And then we get to the end of the day and I didn't close out my short. Tesla made some fucking announcements and as it does and the aftermarket went up. Yeah, whatever percent I'm leveraged short. And I went from something was making a few hundred quid here or there to a four grand loss. But for me at that time there's.

[A]

A lot of money.

[C]

That's a huge amount of money. I remember like feeling sick. I remember I went out, phoned my ex wife fiance at the time and I told her and she was like, fine, come home, we'll talk about it. She said don't do this ever again. So I stopped. But then I did one more thing. I remember it was when Twitter did their ipo and I'll have my long short incorrect here, but I think I went long and it dumped. I think it went up and then dumped. Right. And then so I opened a new long and it dumped more and opened. I think I got to about four or five long positions and, and obviously the losses each time are much worse and I was down heavy and. But I had that classic one, I closed out probably days before it turned around, went back up and if I just had one more.

[B]

But that's, that's the mindset, the doubling.

[C]

Down mindset is it's like you flip a coin and you double that, eventually you run out of money.

[A]

Yeah. And I think you, you described very well there the, the position that I was in. I just didn't do it four times. I probably did it 400 times. And you know that's, that's the degree. But you've, you've type of feeling and sick feeling. Yeah. 100 horrible. Now that goes over time and, and the numbers do lose some sort of relativity during some of that period as well. But it is that doubling down. And you know, I. Going back to the story that you were saying when you saw you had the 4,000 loss and you spoke to your, your fiance at the time, did you close it out? I mean that's.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, I closed it out and then I closed my account.

[A]

Yeah. And that's what I should have Done. Yeah, you know, I should have closed it out and, and stopped doing that. But you know, then you're surrounded by all this success, right? Because I was quite good at passing it off. You know, I'd have to stand in.

[C]

The, in the train side gig job. I can close to work.

[B]

This was.

[A]

No, no, but you did that. You did the right thing in terms of the process of what you did. That's a hundred percent the best way to, to approach it. It's what I should have done. And I knew that. Right. I always knew what I should be doing. I knew I wasn't doing it. I continued and therefore I accept, you know, full responsibility, accountability for everything that happened during that period. Should there have been processes and controls that stopped me doing it? 100%. I, you know, another example, and there, there are a few of these sort of examples that occur throughout the whole story. There was a guy in Hong Kong at the time who was trading, he was trading a Hong Kong product, I think knew him quite well. He was in the debt products division, which was the same division that I was in. And he would regularly mark his trades incorrectly. So, you know, if he was long, he would make it look more favorable in terms of the price that he used to report his trades back to London. And he got found out and they sacked him and, and he moved to Singapore and he started work for a Swiss bank in Singapore and did, started to do very, very well. But he was pushed back into line. And that's why you need those procedures, those, those controls in place to push you back into line, you know. And I think that again, that is in every walk of life and I never got that, I never got pushed back into line. Now it happened to this guy and he's, you know, he still trades. He's one of the, he's the biggest volatility trader in the world now, bar none. But he learned his lesson early and he knew that he wasn't going to push those barriers any further. Whereas I was always able to push those barriers. You know, the, the amount of money, it's like I didn't know what the capital base of the bank was. Barings was only a small bank. The capital base was 250 million pound. Right? I had 650 million pound with me in Singapore. So they were borrowing the money in order to feed me in Singapore. That was pulling all of this cash in all the time. That meant that if I, and I've met a guy who runs a big fund manager down in Mexico these days and we Had a conversation and he said, I was trying to put trades on in Mexico at the time, and I'd be speaking to Andrew Bayliss and he'd say to me, you can't do that. We haven't got any money left. It's all in Singapore.

[C]

But how did. So you, you asked for the five mil?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

What's the next big chunk you ask for?

[A]

I just changes every day, you know, like the next day might have been 10 million. Then you have a particularly bad day, you might be asking for 20 million. It was a real.

[C]

Aren't you thinking at that time, aren't they going to say, hold on a second.

[A]

You're always expecting it, like from, from the very beginning, I'm expecting a knock on the door. Every time the phone rings, I'm jumping up because that's going to be it, it's going to be the end of it. But slowly, over time is you start to think, okay, in the beginning, I've got an hour to solve this or a minute to solve this. And slowly that descends into an hour. Over time, when people aren't asking those questions, you start to think, okay, well, I've got a day. And so you can last for a day. And that's your horizon. And then they're still not asking the questions. And then you've got, you know, all these other things that are happening. You might get an audit from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. They come in and they don't see anything. It's just giving you confidence that you've got a bit more time to survive. And that's all it is. So slowly, days go into weeks and then they go into months, and then it gets dangerous. Right, because now you're develop developing a contempt for everybody around you. They're not going to ask the questions, they don't understand it. So I've got more time to solve this. There's no immediate threat on me. But then you've got Deloitte's coming in. So Deloittes are coming in. And that's an absolute hurdle I'm not going to overcome. But I'm still there. I've got the $5 million now from Tony Hawes, the treasurer in London, and they're still not asking the right questions. And somehow, and I don't know how I survive that audit. So that makes you even more contemptuous of everybody around you, because the external forces aren't good enough or the external checks aren't good enough to stop you either. Not that you're going through all of this. Thought process. But with hindsight, you can see how it happened. And then we've got an internal audit team that come in and they present these recommendations. Now, this is a good bit later on, but they present these internal recommendations are, you know, separation of his duties. Because I was in charge of the back office and the front office, they want certain other things happening. That's all great. I sit down with Simon Jones and James Backs, who were the, the two board directors in Singapore. They look at these and they say, oh, we'll have to do this. And we answer that and we say, yes, yes, yes, yes. You know, fantastic idea. And whatever else, we send it back to London. Nobody follows up, never gets done. So there's no separation of duty. So it's just in terms of an organization and how an organization should work. It was shocking. Nothing was followed up. A bit like to bring it into the crypto world. Bit like ftx.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, like, there's a lot of parallels. You know, auditors were looking at stuff. He was.

[C]

But I'm also thinking Madoff, to, to.

[A]

A degree, you don't want to be associated with Ponzi schemes. Yeah, but.

[B]

Yes, but in some ways it sounds.

[C]

Like what you were doing with your futures.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Was kind of Ponzi. Another month, Another month, another month.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. You weren't paying out any dividends to satisfy people, but you were, you know, I was always reflecting a profit in the account. So, yeah, I agree. And it's, you know, like, obviously I've been on the, on the speaking circuit for a large number of years now, and you do, you do get lots of different questions. And I'm always thinking about things that I was doing. And when I look back at it now, and I try and, and try and summarize, a lot of it was a confidence trick. You know, like people would be phoning me up and asking me what they would believe was a searching question. I'd give an answer that might, you know, be bordering on absolute codswallop. But as long as I was confident about what I was saying, they tended to accept it. And I think you see a lot of that in certain businesses as well. You know, the more confident. If you've got something to hide, don't be sheepish about it. You know, the more confident you are and the more that you come across in that way, the more likely you are to be accepted. And I think that's what happened during that period. There was nobody really with the expertise or understanding to be able to challenge me.

[C]

But then you asked for 650 million.

[A]

Well, no, yeah, well, yeah, and then it gets difficult for them, you know, like you go through to, you go through to the beginning of 1995 and they're struggling to send me money. They're borrowing it, they're borrowing it from Barclays.

[C]

But why are they not. So were there any big, big amounts you asked before that, was there 100 million?

[A]

Oh, yeah, no, I'm sure there was 100 million. At some point there would have been a, definitely there was a 50.

[C]

But even at that point during that period, from my limited understanding, that sounds like a situation. If they're now having to burn for other people, they should be going, well, hold on, what's going on here with Nick?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, well, look, the first thing you do, right, is you do a reconciliation of the positions to try and understand why this is as bad as it is, you know, from a legal perspective or from a regulatory perspective, you can only lend 20% of the bank's capital to one of your subsidiaries. So you can only lend. So the 250 million, they can only lend 50 million to Singapore.

[C]

So when you phone up asking for 650 million, that's 220.

[A]

Is that I don't know how many times. It's 13 times 150.

[C]

240.

[A]

Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, but you can only lend 20. Oh, so you're, you're 13 times. Yeah, and, but, and, and the thing is that every single day the treasurer has to send that to the bank of England who are the regulator at the time.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

And the bank of England have got, so you've got this report that's got to be filed, it goes to the bank of England. And when the Border Banking Supervision Report came out, they asked the guy at the bank of England what he was doing with those reports. It's actually in the Border Banking Supervision Report. And his response is it was too far down in his in tray and he hadn't got around to it yet for two and a half years.

[C]

But when you phone up another 650.

[A]

Million, you're not asking for 650 million in one go. This has accumulated over that 12 year period. Okay, but it's still 650 million. It's still 13 times more than they're allowed to lend to a subsidiary.

[C]

So where did the circuit break actually.

[A]

Hit on this when I left you?

[C]

So, okay, what, so what was the position?

[A]

You're like, oh, well, you know, the, you know that they're getting close. Yeah, right. So they, they sent somebody in February of night. So I left Singapore on 23rd February 1995. That was the day I fled Singapore. So they'd sent somebody from London, a guy called Tony Railton, to look at the. What was going on in Singapore. So they were finally getting close to this reconciliation. He didn't do it for the first two and a half weeks, but then he did a reconciliation. He came to me with a simple piece of paper like you, you, you've got in front of you. You know, A plus B doesn't equal C. Explain why it doesn't equal C.

[C]

And he must have also been thinking.

[A]

Well, he didn't do the reconciliation for a couple of weeks, but when he, when he did it, yeah, your only, your only thought is, hell, this is bad. Yeah, because A and B are tiny and C is huge.

[C]

How did you explain that?

[A]

I didn't. I ran away.

[C]

Oh, you literally ran.

[A]

Yeah. And so I left singing. I left the office, went back home, told my wife we needed to leave Singapore.

[C]

Did you tell her why?

[A]

I told her the ship was going to hit the fan. I don't know if I explained any more than that. I went. So she was packing bags, she was getting some money out of the safe. Wasn't a lot of money, but I think it was $10,000 or so that we had in, in the safe. She was. So she was getting that out. I went to visit somebody that I knew from the trading floor, worked for a different firm. I said, look, you know, the shit's again, shit's going to hit the fan. Don't know how bad it's going to be. Didn't expect the bank to collapse. I knew that there was going to be a significant loss. Yes, it equaled about 650 million pound, but I didn't know what the capital base of the bank was at that at that time. That was only later. So I knew that this was a Thursday, February 23, 1995. So on the Friday this was all going to happen. So I just said to this guy, let me know how bad it is, because I didn't know how bad it was. Yes, it was going to be £650 million, but I didn't know what the impact of that was going to be. So went to the airport, got on a flight to Kuala Lumpur, which was the only place you could get a flight without pre booking a ticket. So flew to Kuala Lumpur, wrote a resignation letter, which, which pretty much said, I'm sorry, dunno, you know, I suppose public. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so. I think so. I think they have. They have a copy of it somewhere if you Google it, I'm sure.

[C]

Oh, I'm sure.

[A]

I'm sure, yeah. You're going to embarrass me now with all the bollocks. I said.

[C]

I might not read it out.

[A]

I think it says I'm sorry at the end. But yeah, And I saw. I was in the Regent Hotel in.

[C]

What was your plan, though, when you run it?

[A]

There's no plan. There's no plan. It's just. I needed to get away from Singapore. I'd spent a. A day in jail in Singapore. It wasn't particularly nice. I'd shown my bum in a bar, did a moon in a bar in Singapore.

[C]

Whilst you're on the run?

[A]

No, no. Prior to this, I was out with some guys from Reuters.

[C]

Oh, so you didn't want to end up in jail there?

[A]

No, because I'd spent a night there in. In the. In the jail cell in Singapore. It wasn't particularly nice. And so I didn't want that, you know, I didn't want that to happen to my wife at the time. And so, yeah, just. Just fled Singapore, ended up in Kuala Lumpur, did this apology letter and then went down for breakfast in the hotel the next morning or something, a cup of coffee or whatever. The first person I saw was somebody from Bearings in kl. So I was like, oh, God, you know, you don't know if the story's breaking, there's nothing on the news. And then the plan was to go. So there was a slight plan. The plan was to meet this guy in Phuket at the weekend. The guy that I'd spoken to in Thailand. Yeah, just before I left. So we went to a travel agent start, tried to get a flight out to Phuket. There were no flights to Phuket that afternoon. So we.

[C]

By the way, it says, I can't find any public scan or verbatim text of Nick Leeson's resignation letter.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

Contemporary and retrospective sources consistently say Barings received a faxed resignation from Leeson in Late Fair in which he apologized and resigned while on the run. But the actual letter doesn't appear to be online.

[A]

Did you.

[C]

Did you feel like you were on the run?

[A]

No, I don't think so. I think when you look back, like, obviously Interpol had been alerted and I was on the run, but it wasn't probably until. So we couldn't get a flight to Phuket. The only flight we could get to get in the afternoon was To Kota Kinabalu was that. Which. It's the Malaysian side of Borneo. So Borneo is split into. Yeah, so you've got a Malaysian side and an Indonesian side. So this was a flight internally, effectively, to. To Kota Kinabalu. We're staying in the Shangri La. And on the 26th of, sorry, the 25th of February, the Saturday, I went down into the news agents in the hotel and picked up the Asian Wall Street Journal, and the headline was British Bank Collapses.

[C]

So it's out, it's done, it's out.

[A]

So this is early on 25 February, which coincidentally, and I don't mind this going out, is my birthday.

[C]

Happy birthday.

[A]

Yeah, that's how I celebrate my birthday since that day. And, you know, I joke. My immediate thought was, somebody's in more trouble than me. And then you realize that it is you and you. This was around the time that sky and CNBC and all those sort of things were starting to come to prominence.

[C]

Were mobile phones a thing there?

[B]

Was it the brick?

[A]

Yeah, the brick things. But.

[C]

But how, if people are trying to find you, how are they trying to communicate? Is it email?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, probably early days. Early days, yeah. You know, I often say if social media existed, I would have been found fairly quickly after. After that particular point. But, yeah, so I'm in Kota Kinabalu, I'm in the Shangri La and, you know, the story starts to unfold. I'm. I'm in regular contact with the guy that I met, that I spoke to before I left. And, you know, he's. From a trading floor perspective, he's given me, you know, like, the trading floor did open that day. Bearings weren't allowed to trade, all that sort of stuff. People, as they do on most trading floors, when something like that happens, they're all trying to get all your gear, so they're nicking your trading jackets and whatever else exists on the trading floor, probably as a memento, and probably a few of those guys still have those. And then, yes, slowly over the next day or so, you start to realize how bad it is. And everybody's looking for you. They know where you are. You're in Malaysia because you've seen this guy who you. And you haven't left, you haven't crossed the border, and then you're trying to work out, do I go to Australia or New Zealand, which is, you know, turn left, or do I try to get back to Europe and the UK, which is turn right. You know, basically, I'm 12 hours either way. Whichever way I'm going and decide to try to get back to Europe. So we went to a travel agent in. In Kota Kinabalu and we. We booked a flight which went back to Frankfurt. That was the first European destination that we could get.

[C]

Because of Interpol?

[A]

Well, because of the girl in the travel agent, believe it or not. So somehow, and I remember it, you know, fairly vividly, we. We were trying to get out of Kota Kinabalu and the flight went to. Went to Brunei. From Brunei it went to Bangkok. From Bangkok it went to Abu Dhabi. And from Abu Dhabi it went to Frankfurt. So it's a real circuitous route. And when we were trying to cross that border in Malaysia, for me, you know, there's no way I'm getting through this border. So I make my wife at the time go first. She gets through and I hand over my passport. Somehow I get through. You know, really don't understand it. We're then on the flight to Brunei. You get off in Brunei and it's a circular airport and there's all the departure gates around it. They've all got a TV above them and my face is on every one of those TVs. So they used to have these hotels that you. It's like.

[C]

It's surreal. Is it?

[A]

It gets crazier. So they have like these little hotels that are on the floor down that you can go and check into and you can stay there for eight or nine hours. So we go and check, check into one of those whilst we're waiting for this next flight. The story's getting bigger and bigger. You got Kenneth Clark, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, walking up and down and berating you in no uncertain terms. I did a talk a few years ago with, with John Berkoff at the Speaker. Yeah, Speaker's house. It was a charity thing that they were doing. And he was one of the junior finance ministers at the time, and he said he was just absolute bedlam that was going on in, in their particular area at the time. And then eventually, you know, it comes to time to board the flight. So you've got a. You know, it's like the. What do they call it when, when you're walking home after a night out, the walk of shame. You're doing that walk of shame over to. To the departure gate. Your face is on the TV screen, you've got your collar up and, you know you're in Brunei. So it's probably 35 degrees, but you've almost got a hat on trying to get through to the boarding Gate. And somehow I did.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

And then you get onto the plane. It's back in those. The olden days where they start to give out newspapers and you're on it. I'm on every newspaper. It doesn't matter if it's English, French, German, Italian. I'm on all of these newspapers and I'm sat on the flight and everybody's reading this story like you talk about surreal. Like, it's just unbelievable. And then you get off. You know, you get off the flight in. In Bangkok, you've got to change flights.

[C]

Should have just stayed in Bangkok.

[A]

Just unbelievable. And then we're in Abu Dhabi. The flight taxis in and pulls up next to a Singapore Airlines flight and you just. And then you're getting off of that. They're disembarking at the same time, and you just, like, you couldn't make it up. And then eventually, whilst I'm on that flight to Frankfurt, the girl who we booked the flight with in Kota Kinabalu has seen the story and has seen my face. So they tell me, and has contacted the police and said he booked a flight to Frankfurt.

[C]

And they waited on the tarmac for you?

[A]

Yeah, they came to the plane. Yeah, the plane pulled up early and the police came out to the plane and. Yeah, took me off and took me to an area, went through my bags and. And they said we were being arrested for traveling on false passports. I said, look, there's no way, you know, I wouldn't know where to get a false. I could probably get you one now. I wouldn't have been able to get you one at the time type of thing, but. So that's what we were both arrested on. Traveling on forged passports. That was quickly rubbished. And then the Singaporeans changed the charges. So they. They removed the charges for my wife, and my charges were. Were cheating. They turned up a few hours later to take me back to Singapore. Singapore. Which the Germans wouldn't let them do.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

I was then in Germany for nine months. I met the sfo, Serious Fraud Office for a week.

[C]

Where were you prosecuted?

[A]

Singapore.

[C]

You were prosecuted?

[A]

Yeah. The SFO wouldn't bring me back.

[C]

But where did you serve your time? Singapore. Oh, you had to. So you had to go back?

[A]

Yeah, I was extradited back to Singapore of half years. So you get. So that's four years, four months. You get a third off for good behavior.

[B]

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[C]

Was there any time during that period where you almost felt relieved? You're like, oh, it's over, yeah. Or is it just shit all the way through?

[A]

Yeah, it's, I think it's a common cliche and I try to avoid them as much as I can. People say, oh, it must have been a massive sense of relief when they arrested you. Absolutely. No, I'm shitting myself.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Because now I'm going to German prison. This is where the, it was the breakup of the Balkan states.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So like Yugoslavia, Croatia and whatever exists now didn't exist then. So they were all fighting. There was loads of gun runners in there. There was a lot of Kurds in the prison in Germany. I was there for nine months.

[C]

Was it rough?

[A]

It was, I suppose, yeah, it was rough. But you have to know how to behave. And if I go back and look at everything that happened to me over that period, you know, I was very working class lad, council estate living in a blue blooded world of bearings and did that easily.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So I was very socially adept in, in that regard, but equally socially adept in prison because, because of my background, you know, I could get on with anybody as long as you're not confrontational. So in Germany, you know, you did see a few nasty things. You know, if there was somebody was convicted of a sex offense, they got a, a particularly brutal time in, in the prison in Frankfurt.

[C]

Good.

[A]

Them, yeah, yeah, no, I agree entirely. You know, like, it's funny, years later I was asked to do, when I was returned from Singapore, I think it was Amnesty International or, or Prisoners Abroad, one of those sort of things, said, you know, would you be prepared to come and do a bit of work for us? Do A bit of charity work and I said I would, but I need to, I need to decide or, or choose the people that I want to work for. I'm not, I'm not raising money for a pedophile who's in Cambodia. So look, that's Gary Glitter, by the way. Yeah, I know, I'm joking.

[C]

So look, we, we've, we've laughed through this a lot because I think you laugh at about something like this, but because it's just such a wild story. But there also must be some serious sides of this. It must have affected a lot of people's lives.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

What are the things that you've had to wrestle with personally?

[A]

It's, it's a good question. I mean, the, you know, me personally, success has always been an important part of my life. So, you know, now I've got a life where I can't, it's not fair to say that I can't be successful, but I'm not achieving success in the same way that I would have used to focus on when I was younger in terms of business success.

[C]

Well, that past done.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I'm. No, I'm not going to get another job within the world of finance. Haven't applied anywhere. But if anybody's listening, I'm still, I'm 58 now. I've got a couple of years left in me. But no. So, like, the traditional or the early way that I was achieving success is not available to me. So you go through, you know, you have to. And this happened in prison, you know, you take a long hard look at yourself and you have to be really honest with yourself about things that happened, the way that you reacted and the way that you prefer to be. So you make changes and that's a fairly, you know, that's a fairly nasty process to go through. But. And then you start to focus on yourself. So your self esteem, your self worth, your self values, everything that's important to you and they don't change massively over your lifetime. I don't think, you know, as much as my behavior hasn't changed hugely, you know, you, you've got characteristics. There's a good end, there's a bad end. I've been at the bad end. I'm getting, I have been closer to the good end. I'm probably in the middle, do you know what I mean? But I'm happy with, with where I'm at. You know, a lot of my success these, these days comes from being a parent and looking at how my children are doing. And the successes that they're having. But what about how it affected other people? Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a strange one, right, because bearings, you know, like regularly. And I think it happened last week or the week before. You know, somebody pops up on social media and says, well, my granny lost all of her money because of you. And you know, I have to respond in with an honest answer. And the honest answer is, no, they didn't. Because, you know, your granny didn't have an account with bearings. They didn't have accounts like that. It wasn't institutions, institutions, but they all got paid back.

[C]

They claw. So there's a clawback mechanism.

[A]

Yeah, they like the bond holders. So we missed out on this bit. But in, in February of 1990 or January, February in 1995. So I've had the 650 million. There's no money left in the, in the pot and bearings in London, but I still need more money. We're getting close to the bonus period because the bonus, the year ends.

[C]

Did you get a bonus?

[A]

No. Well, we can get there if you want. But the, the, the. Yes, a sore point, I know, but. No, I'm joking. The. So the year end changed to December. So the auditors are back in, in 1995 and they're, they're, they're. I've lost my thread there. What we were talking about.

[C]

We were talking about the clawback and that they didn't lose.

[A]

Yeah. Okay. So, so early on, in, early on in 1995, I'm still needing more money. The bank's out of money. So they went, they issued a bond.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

They went to the stock market to get another hundred million that was coming to me in Singapore. I was unaware of it at the time, but that's what the treasury and the board of directors in London have decided to do. So year, many years later, after the collapse of the bank, I was doing a talk in Luxembourg for a fund management conference and there was a guy there called Miles with a carnac. Miles used to be the number two at Baring Brothers. So very, very senior. He's passed away since. But he was at this conference. I was speaking to Miles. There was no, you know, he didn't try to stab me or anything like that. So it was, it was cordial. But a lot of the bondholders were there. So it was people like Brussels Investment bank and people like that. And they, they told me that they had all of their money repaid. All of the account holders at Barings, and I know a few of them Personally, you know, because some of them were futures traders that traded with me. They all had their money repaid. The. So some of the stories to say that, you know, people lost their life savings and stuff like that, it's unfortunately, it's rubbish. I don't want to, I don't want to make a big deal of it. But individuals, individuals within the organization. ING bought bearings for a pound.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

So there were two and a half thousand employees. I'd say 2,000 of those employees went to work for ING. None of them still work for ING. So definitely it affected their careers. There were people in Singapore that, that lost their jobs that didn't get them back. Those were the people that worked directly for me. I did a radio program a few years ago called the Reunion, which was reuniting people from the time, you know, I, I did it.

[C]

What a reunion.

[A]

Yeah. I'm not looking forward to it because, you know, it's Peter Norris, who's the CIO of Bearings at the time. It's the liquidator, Alan Bloom. Andrea Ledson was there.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

Yeah, because she used to work for bzw. So she was kind of a market voice from the time. She, she. Helen run for the leadership of the Conservative Party at the time, but she was prominent still. So this was about, I'd say six or seven, it could be eight years ago now. There was John Gapper, who was the, the Financial Times investigative journalist of, of the time. He wrote a few books about it. And, and it was tough not, not for any of the others. Right. But for. Meeting Peter Norris was tough because he was, he. It was, it was weird. It was, you know, it was a big round table. I think David Dimbleby or somebody like that was the, was coordinating the discussions.

[C]

But you're the central figure.

[A]

I think me and Peter were probably the central figures because he had to face the, you know, you mentioned I had the storm. Yeah, I was in the eye of the storm, but I was dealing with it from a distance. You know, I was in prison, so it was all a case of reading newspapers and stuff like that. So I didn't have the media glare. Peter did. And you could see from the stories that the other people were telling. So Alan Bloom's stories, John Gapper's stories, you could see the damage that that did to Peter. And that was difficult to take. Really, really, really difficult to take. You know, so I apologize to him unreservedly during the, during the conversation. You know, he used to be the dapper city gent. You know, he had a Pair of DMS on and you know, a pair of chinos. And he took his shoes off during the meeting. It was all quite weird. And you know, I think it's the first thing that he said when, when he arrived because I was one of the first people there at the studios. We were doing. He's, you know, he said something like where's the man? Or, or something like that. And it just, I don't know, everything kind of cut me a little bit that day. Yeah, it was tough.

[C]

But was there any handshake, any good luck? Or was it just like done and out?

[A]

I think it was more done and out. It was cordial. It was cordial. You know, like I've come across Peter, Peter's now the non exec chairman of Branson's companies. So, so he's, you know, he's gone on and he's, he's prospered and he's done well and I'm, you know, there's.

[C]

A scar on him.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And you could see that you scarred him and because again, you know, he was somebody that was used to success being at the top of the organization and it all came crashing down for him because of my actions. And yeah, it was a tough conversation. And now I do, you know, like I, I. There's a guy called God trying to think his name. I'll remember his name in a minute. But he, he and I always come across people who are ex barians at talks. You know, they've worked in the, in the trading side of it. They've done, there's no, I, I never really in encounter any, any bad feeling. Strangely, Strangely. Because, you know, they've all moved on. Some people say it was the best thing that ever happened to him. You know, because they went on and their career took a different turn and they went on and they were far more prosperous as a result of it. This guy's name was Trevor Slaverski. So Trevor, he's still in London. He's a, he was a main, main, main board director at Barings and he used to turn up to a few of my events in London. And you know, I, I used to say to him, you know, why do you keep turning up at these events? And he said, it's just to keep you honest, Nick. You know, I don't want you telling any lies. And I did one event in for a big block trading company in, in London and he was there with a table of bearings people and at the end of the conversation he, you know, somebody stood up and asked me a question about Ron Baker, who was the head of the debt products division, and said, you know, what was he really like? And I said, he, you know, he wasn't a bad guy. I'm not really, you know, into character assassination. And Trevor stood up at that point and said, look, Nick, you've not told any lies. I've been listening to you for the last hour and a half. But he said, that's the first lie that you told. Ron Baker was a complete and utter. And he used a word that I probably shouldn't use. Well, yeah, I think so, but we're at 10.

[C]

You want to continue at all? Do you need to go?

[B]

I've just got a few more.

[C]

This is a few more things. It's so, so intriguing.

[A]

We can follow up if you want to.

[B]

Well, just.

[C]

There's a couple more bits with this I definitely want. Yeah, and we should. And we should talk about life and other things at some point because there's loads we could talk about. But I'm, I'm. There's a big story where obviously you've got cancer in prison. We. Could we cover that another time? Because what I'm. I'm a little more interested about. I'm not like saying that's not an important part of your own story, but. But I'm really intrigued. When you come out of prison.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

You're essentially a convicted criminal. You can't go back into finance. I'm assuming you're broke. How. To an extent. I mean, you're not. You've got to earn an income at some point.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

How do you even go about deciding, what am I going to do with my life now?

[A]

It's a great question and it's a weird one because, you know, in those final few weeks when you're in prison, you're trying to put some of that together. And the time is going painstakingly slowly as you're getting closer and closer to release day. It's an unbelievable type of situation. So you're thinking you're going to travel, you'll just avoid people and you'll, you know, that that's one option. So the first thing that happened when I was on the plane back to Singapore, the liquidators wanted to hit me with an injunction. And so my lawyers asking me, how much do you want the injunction to be for? And I'm like, well, it doesn't matter. I didn't steal any money. And he said, yeah, no, that's right. But, you know, is it 100 million? Is it 200 million? Like it's a stupid number. And. And so in the end I arrived in Heathrow Airport. You know, you've got all the paparazzi and everybody there taking pictures and what have you. And they, they take me off to the Hilton Hotel, up into one of the bedrooms, which is a bit weird with the liquidators when you think about it. And they give me, they make me sign an injunction for 100 million pound. I then go down.

[C]

What does that mean?

[A]

Well, that they. If for me, in reality, if. Well, if I earn any money, they're entitled to it, up to £100 million. But it was more of a controlling mechanism. So they were worried about me. You know, if I did have some money hidden somewhere, was I going to go out and buy a Ferrari and go and pose outside, you know, various buildings and just say, look, you know, off liquidators type of thing, which was never in me, it's not me as a person. But they were worried about that in the beginning. So it became a controlling mechanism. So they seized all of my assets. Well, they didn't seize them, we gave them to them. So there was a couple of houses in, in the Woolwich sort of area. There was certain amounts of money, not a lot amount, not a lot of money. I'd sold a book so they were entitled to the proceeds from Rogue Trader Book. Yeah, I did that whilst I was in prison in Germany, but that was paying my legal fees. There wasn't a great deal of it left. We did a TV interview with somebody in Holland who paid 100 grand to be the person to do the first interview. The Daily Mail paid 105 or 110 grand to serialize the story for the first week that I came out. So that was all the liquidators were entitled to all of that and they took that. But what they agreed to do was to give me three grand a month for medical expenses. Medical expenses which wasn't used for medical expenses but, you know, kept me going. And then I started to do a bit of after dinner speaking and stuff like that, which I've been doing for the last 26 years. And so that's how I started to supplement that and build that back. You know, you get paid for a few newspaper interviews and bits and pieces like that along the way and slowly start to build back from that process. So it wasn't. I wasn't completely broke, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't doing any of the things that they expected me to do or feared that I would do. They also were bringing cases against the auditors. So they wanted to interview me for those, for those processes as well. So I was always available to them as I was available to the auditors. So there were a couple of lawsuits that were going back and forth as well, none of which really went anywhere. Cooper's pay. Who were the auditors in there? Or I think, yeah, I can't remember who somebody else was involved with Coopers, but they, they paid 70 million to settle their lawsuit. Deloitte's took it to the end in court and I think the judge decided that there was contributory negligence so that Deloitte didn't have to pay anything or there was a, you know, an off record settlement that wouldn't have been particularly big. So going through that process for a little bit. I went back to university, did a psychology degree just to put some format back into my life because I had a year where, you know, I'd be going out, partying, meeting people and then, and, you know, getting, getting drunk all weekend and then on a Monday I'd be really empty because I'd be looking at myself and thinking, what am I going to do today? And everybody else has gone to work. And yeah, I found that difficult to cope with. So I needed to put some structure back into my life. So I did a psychology degree for the next three years. Then I remarried, moved to Ireland and I've been there ever since.

[C]

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[B]

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[C]

Are there any days. Do you ever have days? You might say yes or loads. But do you have any days where you don't think of bearings?

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah, it does.

[C]

It gets to. You get to move beyond it.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And none of it hurts anymore. Do you know what I mean? It's more, you know, the things. You realize that the things that are important are the people around you.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, so it's your friends, your family, and, you know, you might lose one or two along the way. For me, people that. That I worked with in the city, the majority of them. And it's not, you know, it's not 100 of them because there are still some that I'm very, very close to, but the majority of them are just acquaintances. You're passing by.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

But, you know, it's family and friends and what they think of you. So, you know, like I. I mentioned at the beginning, my son's 21 these days. I have two stepchildren as well, but he's 21 and, you know, I think it was 10 years ago, maybe, or it might have even been sooner than. More recently than that. He didn't know I'd been to prison, didn't know that I'd been married before, all those sort of things. It's because he knows me, right. And he grows up with me. So the person before and the things that happened. It's not quite noise, but it is noise if you. If you like. Because, you know, we have a very close relationship, going to the football together and all that sort of stuff. And so I'm his dad rather than this person that. But Leeson is about from time to time.

[C]

Leeson isn't actually a common. That common name.

[A]

No.

[B]

Has he ever had it?

[C]

Somebody goes, oh, I think he had.

[A]

It once at school.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Where somebody said something and. But it wasn't particularly, you know, it's one of those weird ones. Right. You either. You either come up, you maybe might. Maybe might meet a chartered accountant who's. Who. Who's 60, who wants to spit in your face type of thing, because he absolutely hates everything about you because of what happened.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Or you come across somebody who's a little bit younger, a bit more. A bit more current.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

If that's a fair statement.

[C]

You're describing me right now.

[A]

Yeah, probably.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Who says, you know, what a fantastic story.

[C]

Yeah. Just, just.

[A]

I would have done exactly the same.

[C]

Yeah, I do. I mean, just. You do. Just you just want to hear the story because it is such a is a is. And like I say that there's lots of things, different periods in your time where you hear these stories that you're a story. There's all different. Hillsborough's a story.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

There's Michael Jackson, when he died is a story.

[B]

There's like all these different things, but.

[C]

Like Nick Gleason and Barron's bank is one of those ones. Once you got in touch, I told my son, I was like you. This was at the time for if. I mean, I'm trying to remember, it probably is about a week, but for a week it was. This is the story and that's the person.

[B]

And by the way, the stuff with the kids.

[C]

And I mean, I've had the same with my son. He, you know, I was a drug addict at one point and he. I got in the car, picked him up school once. He was about 14, 15. So I tell, I need to ask you about something. So he said, I was Googling you and I found this story and it says that you were a drug addict. I said, yeah, it's true. I was. It did this happened. And, you know, he knows me as dad.

[A]

Yeah, but I think you use those things to empower your children. So it's like, you know, my son's name is Mackenzie and to Kirsty and Alex as well, the stepchildren. You know, I always say, you know, you're going to come across different circumstances and different situations in your life, but always do the right thing, right? And if you, you know, if you find, if you're struggling with something, come and ask me. You know, you might not like my response because there might be a bit a period of punishment that follows it. But I'm always going to be there to help you.

[C]

I'm always on your side.

[A]

Yeah. And point you in the right direction. The only thing I ever want is the best for you. You might not get there in a straight line.

[C]

This is so funny. I mean, Connor will be listening to this because he'll edit it. But I mean, it's a similar thing. You know, we have a little clash because he works for me, he works on the show, helps me with the football club and we have clashes sometimes. And I always have to say, look, look, I am just trying to point you in the right direction. And I can't do that just by being nice all the time. Sometimes I've got to give you some home truth. Sometimes you're disorganized or you're. He's A great kid. I love him to pieces. But, yeah, it's a similar.

[A]

It's a. Yeah, it's a tough one. I mean, you know, I can't tell you the amount of times I wake up and I. I say, look, do this, do that, do that, and it won't get done for three days. And, like, it infuriates the life out.

[B]

Where's your to do list?

[A]

Eventually, he sees that I was right, but, you know, it take. It does take a while, but they.

[C]

Move forward in the right direction.

[A]

100. Yeah. Like, as you've said about Connor, you know, he is regarded as one of the nicest kids that people have ever met because, again, you know, he gives everybody time. He'll speak to everybody, and he's, you know, he's knowledgeable and he's. He's very polite and all of those things that I would have been years ago. But I think, you know, Connor, he both probably.

[C]

Yeah, probably.

[A]

Yeah, probably describing, you know, a very similar person, but to another level as well. So it's, you know, and that. And that gives me pride as well, you know, because people do remark on, you know, on. On how they find him.

[C]

So I have the same him, Connor that. I mean, he's a much nicer person than I am. He is. He's got a very kind soul.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

He's got more patience than me. He's very caring. And.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And he. I mean, he's gonna hear this, but I say it to him. I was like. Like, I don't know if you've got this yourself with your kids, but there comes a time when you actually start to learn from them. And there are things I learned.

[A]

I don't want to admit it.

[C]

No, you don't want to admit it. But. But there are times, like, you don't really. Well, I say that I learned from my son at 4, when I slapped him on the leg, or 5, whatever age he was, he hit me back. But I actually learned from him. Him now.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And he gives me advice at times, and I usually just knock it away.

[B]

Straight away, and then sometimes I have.

[C]

To go back and apologize. He actually gives me good advice.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Really good advice. He. He has my back. He looks out for me.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

You know, I'm in the public eye sometimes, and he's like, you're making mistakes here. Stop arguing with people on Facebook. Do this. And it's. It's a really interesting transition because, like, with my dad now, when he comes over, I'm pretty much looking after him. I sort everything out for him and my son will have to do the same at some point.

[B]

I've just found that a really unique.

[C]

Unique part of parenting, that, that bit where, where you can learn from your own kids.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, no, there's, you know, there's, there's definitely some of that. And yeah, look, it's a fantastic journey and it's, you know, when I was in Singapore and it was very, I was very much focused on me. Whereas now it's family and that transition has been, has been powerful and good.

[C]

Nick, I could talk to you for ages. I know you've got to go something else and there's loads on more I want to talk to you about. I really wanted to ask you how some, you know, having gone through what you've gone through, how you reflected on the 2008 financial crisis, what happened there. I want to ask you, I do want to ask you about what it was like having cancer in prison. I want to ask you about your views on the world. But I think what we should do, we should just do this again sometime.

[A]

Yeah, we do part two, we'll do part two.

[C]

We'll, we'll, we'll talk a little bit about football. Who does, who does McKenzie support?

[A]

He has no choice. Did you support Man City? And I'm not a glory.

[C]

No, no, you wouldn't be. You don't find, you know, 58 year old man City glory hunters like I grew up, I grew up as a Liverpool fan and I went through the 30 years of no leagues. I mean I, I started around when it was about, you know, dog leash was player manager. And then so when we won the league finally during COVID because my son, I didn't force him to be Liverpool. He actually chose him myself, I was like, I've waited 30 years for this.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

I also said to him with England, I was like, you don't know the I've been through with England. We've had two Euro finals in a World Cup.

[A]

Like, look, I used to be, I like football was a huge part of my life growing up through, you know, working in the city. I, I just used to love going to football matches. So, you know, I went to England a good bit. I think the defining point for, for Mackenzie, a good friend of mine used to play for Man City. His name's Gary Owen. He played for West Brom and a few other places as well. But we were at Gary's house and he, and he kind of has this den downstairs and he had this little cow that used to sing Blue Moon. And so Mackenzie just used to play it, like, when he was young, he just used to play it all the time. And so I let him support Arsenal for about six months just to kind of, you know, let him have some choice. But then the Blue Moon cow took over.

[C]

A father and son needs to swap the same side. When I see it, I'm like, what is going on here? You've just given yourself. You've just taken away from yourself decades of going to football together and, like, going through the highs and lows. I mean, Connor's the vice chairman of Ralph Ledford and, you know, we go through the whole experience together.

[A]

That's fantastic.

[C]

Pole experience. Every game we stood with each other, we discuss it all and it's. Look, we could talk for hours. I could go tangent after tangent. Let's do this again.

[A]

One last.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Like, he. Mackenzie phoned me yesterday. Do you know there's only a thousand tickets for Monaco away? So he was, you know, he wants to know if we can get a ticket from Monaco away. That was his big thing yesterday, because I missed a call when. I mean, I was meeting with somebody and he's phoning. I'm thinking, God, what's this gonna be about? It's like, tickets for Monaco away.

[C]

Nick, great to meet. Honestly, it's like I say, when you popped up on my Twitter, I was like, no way is this Nick Gleason and I've enjoyed. We could have probably chat for hours. We'll definitely do it again. We'll talk about football, we'll talk about Ireland, we'll talk about finance, we'll talk about the world, everything. But, yeah, look, keep going. Good luck to you, man.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

And thank you, everyone, for listening.

[C]

We'll speak to you soon. Bye.