Eagle-eyed accountant spots missing UBS billions

Ex-UBS accountant William Steward spent the next few weeks puzzling over the $3.57bn discrepancy.

Mr Steward, who worked in UBS product control at the time, testified at a London court today that he tried to reconcile the numbers after Mr Adoboli claimed he had used “a shortcut while he was under pressure for time,” rather than booking every trade that was made.

“What we were seeing is trades that were being entered that didn’t have another side to them” Mr told jurors, noting the practice was “unusual, but not unknown”.

“It wasn’t very impressive, but it made sense,” Steward testified.

Transactions confuse jurors

Mr Adoboli is accused of fraud and false accounting after the Swiss bank UBS discovered it had lost $2.3bn through unauthorised trading. He was arrested last year after blaming his losses on the escalating euro-zone crisis. He pleaded not guilty to the charges and has not testified so far in the trial, expected to last eight weeks.

Jurors, selected from the public with varying backgrounds, had trouble understanding the technical detail of evidence on Tuesday, the judge said.

But Prosecutor Sasha Wass told the jury it did not matter.

She said it was less important for jurors to understand the banking transactions than it was for them to decide whether Mr Adoboli’s explanation about the trades was genuine or merely designed to confuse Mr Steward.

Gambling spree

UBS’s losses were so large, the bank was in danger of collapse. the court has already been told.

Prosecutor Sasha Wass accused the 32-year-old trader of jeopardising almost £10bn of the bank’s money, but in the end “gambled away” a tenth of that in high-risk trades.

“He fraudulently gambled it away. He also in doing so wiped around 10 per cent or about $4.5bn (£2.8bn) off the bank’s share price,” she said. “Like most gamblers, he believed he had the magic touch. Like most gamblers, when he lost, he caused chaos and disaster to himself and all of those around him,” Ms Wass said.