Jerome Kerviel the former Societe General rouge trader who accrued nearly €5 billion, or $7.7 billion has been released from jail after just over one month. He is still under investigation and surely will be going back to jail for a long time, but he will probably be bringing some friends with him.

So far the prosecution believes Kerviel worked alone, but many think this is impossible due to significance of the fraud. They say he began creating fictitious trades in 2006 and early 2007 that were relatively small, but got a little power hungry and the trades increased drastically. He eventually made illegal trades totaling $63.5 billion!

Some have described him as a computer genius while others have said he was nothing special. He was a smart guy though. He had a salary of about $90,000 in 2006 and earned a bonus $76,000 and in 2007 he was expected to get bonuses of at least $381,000.

To cover up his early gains Kerviel created fictitious trades that actually showed losses to cover up the massive gains. Obviously this is bad for the company because it is illegal, but many traders say their bosses will look the other way if it’s not too outrageous. The fact that he was caught almost two years after he began the fraudulent trading when he hadlost money, rather than make money is suspicious. This is not something that could possibly go unnoticed unless soemone turned their heads. It seems to me that he started out well and they pretended they didn’t notice, but once he got out of control and the company got scared of being caught, they “caught” him. The business world can be hard, but it sure does look fun!

By the way, he was just hired after his release from prison by Lemaire Consultants and Associes, an information-technology consultancy specializing in IT networking and security. I don’t know if you want this guy to work on your security, but maybe they just wanna get a piece of that fraudulent trading!