Kweku Adoboli is a Ghanaian investment manager and former stock trader. He was convicted of illegally trading away US$2 billion as a trader for Swiss investment bank UBS. While at the bank he primarily worked on UBS' Global Synthetic Equities Trading team in London where he engaged in what would later be known as the 2011 UBS rogue trader scandal. After serving a prison sentence, he lost several appeals against the Home Office decision to deport him to Ghana.
Adoboli joined UBS's London office as a graduate trainee in September 2006. After working for two years as a trading analyst in the bank's back office, he was promoted to a Delta One trading desk. In 2008, he became a director on the ETF desk, and by 2010, he was promoted to director, with a total annual salary of almost £200,000. Beginning in 2008, Adoboli started using the bank's money for unauthorised trades. He entered false information into UBS's computers to hide the risky trades he was making. He exceeded the bank's per-employee daily trading limit of US$100 million, and failed to hedge his trades against risk. He also used his personal funds on two spread betting accounts, IG Index and City Index, where he lost around £100,000. In mid-2011, UBS launched an internal investigation into Adoboli's trades. On 14 September 2011, Adoboli wrote an e-mail to his manager admitting to booking false trades. His trades cost the bank $2 billion and wiped off $4.5 billion from its share price. The trading losses he incurred while trading for his bank were the largest unauthorised trading losses in British history.
Charges and conviction
On 15 September 2011, Adoboli was arrested by City of London Police. He was charged with two counts of fraud by abuse of position and four counts of false accounting. He was in prison on remand until 8 June 2012, when he was granted bail subject to being electronically tagged and placed under curfew at a friend's house. On the morning of20 November 2012, a jury at Southwark Crown Court unanimously found Adoboli guilty on one count of fraud. Later the same day, after receiving an instruction allowing for a majority decision with a single vote against, the jury found him guilty of a second count of fraud. The jury also found him not guilty on the four false accounting charges. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. 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."
Imprisonment and subsequent appeal against deportation
Adoboli served out his sentence at HMP The Verne in Dorset, then at HMP Ford in West Sussex and finally at HMP Maidstone in Kent. He was released in June 2015. As he was solely a Ghanaian citizen, having never naturalised as a British citizen despite having lived in the United Kingdom since 1991, Adoboli was liable for automatic deportation under Section 32 of the UK Borders Act 2007 as a foreign criminal who had been sentenced to at least twelve months of imprisonment. He was served with deportation proceedings in July 2015, and lived with friends in London and Edinburgh. After his release he gave many talks to students, financial traders and others in the banking industry on operating ethically and avoiding the mistakes he made. Adoboli lost his original appeal against the Home Secretary's order of deportation made against him in July 2016, and has since continued to make attempts to appeal; he was eventually denied permission for a judicial review of the deportation order and his deportation was originally scheduled for September 2018. Adoboli believes his deportation is due to the Home Office hostile environment policy on immigration. Officials from the Home Office, however, state that their actions and the underlying decision on an application of a long-standing government policy, supported by the law. Adoboli was deported to his native Ghana on 14 November 2018 after his appeals against deportation were turned down.
