Kweku Adoboli: Rogue trader who lost £1.5 billion walks free after serving less than half his sentence

 
Rogue trader: Kweku Adoboli lost £1.5 billion in unauthorised trades (Picture: AFP/Getty Images)
Andrew Cowie, AFP/Getty Images
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The City’s worst ever rogue trader has been freed from prison after serving less than half his seven year sentence.

Kweku Adoboli, who lost £1.5 billion through unauthorised trading while working at investment bank UBS, was released last week from Maidstone prison in Kent.

Mr Adoboli, 35, who worked on the global synthetic equities desk at UBS, spent nearly nine months behind bars awaiting trial and has served an additional two and a half years since his fraud conviction in November 2012.

The former boarding school head boy was held in four prisons, including Wandsworth in London, before he was released on bail ahead of his 2012 trial.

Since his conviction, he has spent time at the Verne prison on the Isle of Portland in Dorset and later sent to Maidstone, an immigration detention centre in Kent, as well as the low security prison Ford.

Mr Adoboli was arrested in 2011 over the largest unauthorised trading loss in British history.

The Ghanian-born trader was found guilty of two counts of fraud but cleared of four counts of false accounting.

A statement by the City of London Police said: "This was the UK’s biggest fraud, committed by one of the most sophisticated fraudsters the City of London Police has ever come across."

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