OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!: SocGen's Daniel Bouton pelted with "BOOOOs!" by angry shareholders
SocGen's angry mob spoke at today's annual meeting, and it wasn't pretty. (But it sounds like it would have been fun to be there!)....
Shareholders heckled and jeered management of French bank Societe Generale at its annual general meeting on Tuesday, taking them to task for the loss of billions blamed on a rogue trader.
Chairman Daniel Bouton, who has resisted heavy pressure to resign over the scandal, was booed down when he insisted that rogue trader Jerome Kerviel's multi-billion euro (dollars) trades were "concealed" from management.
"The employee was jailed but it is the bosses who should have gone," said one man to loud applause, charging that management had turned the bank into a "casino."
Bouton opened the meeting by saying that the 4.9 billion euro (7.75 billion dollar) loss taken on Kerviel's positions resulted from "an isolated operational risk.
"It does not fundamentally call into question the core of Societe Generale's market activities," he said, noting that seven officials had left the bank in the intervening period. Five of those were sacked.
Two were dismissed on disciplinary grounds, three for under-performance, he specified.
"Mister chairman, I wonder who you take us for," retorted another shareholder who claimed to have been a customer of Societe Generale for 36 years.
"Who would you have believe that one can do those sort of things with impunity? Either this suited management at Societe Generale or else the controls (on traders) were non-existent," he said.
"You speculated and that is all there is to it. It is you who are in the dock and Kerviel is just a puppet."
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