Missing man is not a high-flier

As the AIB admitted yesterday that it had lost $750 million (€863.5 million) in fraudulent trading at its US division, parallels were being drawn with the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995.

AIB stressed it was in no danger of demise, but the search for Mr John Rusnak recalled the case of Mr Nick Leeson, the currency trader imprisoned for four years after a $1.4 billion fraud was exposed in 1995. One of Britain's most blue-blooded banks, Barings was brought to its knees by the fraud at its Singapore office and was eventually sold to a Dutch rival, ING, for £1.

The culprit was Mr Leeson, the bank's star trader in the financial market at Singapore. Then aged 28, Mr Leeson was arrested in Frankfurt as he came off a flight from Borneo. He had fled Singapore as the crisis developed and was sent back there to face trial. Sentenced to six and a half years for fraud, he was released after four years for good behaviour.

Mr Leeson's spokeswoman in London said yesterday that he had no comment on the AIB case.

Unlike Mr Rusnak, a relatively junior official who earned $85,000 a year before his disappearance on Monday, Mr Leeson was the office whizz. Mr Rusnak lives in the suburbs of Baltimore in Maryland. A family man, he is apparently a board member of a local school. Mr Leeson's lifestyle in Singapore was very much that of the yuppie.

From London, he grew up in a working class family. After failing maths at school, he worked first as a clerk with the Queen's bankers, Coutts, and later moved to Morgan Stanley. Keen for success, he took a posting with Barings in Jakarta before moving to Singapore.

A highly paid currency specialist with a salary of $565,756, colleagues on the floor of the Singapore stock market called him the "king of the exchange". The figures were good - Mr Leeson delivered 20 per cent of Barings' profit in 1993.

There was a catch, of course, underlined by the failure of Barings' bosses to scrutinise properly Mr Leeson's performance. The trader had an ego problem; he could not accept failure. So when Mr Leeson incurred big losses on highly risky futures transactions on the currency exchanges, he buried them for two years in a secret "error account" at Barings.

As the deficit mounted, Mr Leeson took bigger risks. Out of control, he thought it would work out in the end. It didn't. The lies were uncovered only after an earthquake struck Japan in February 1995, threatening a collapse of the market. It was too late to save the bank.

Like many other ex-pat bankers who make fortunes in Asia's emerging markets, money was no worry for Nick Leeson. His wife Lisa stood by her husband in the wake of the scandal, but later divorced him.