Seven Years Ago in TIME

By Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland, Victoria Rainert, Roy B. White, Rebecca Winters

Enron executives are hardly the first to be accused of messing with other people's money. A rogue trader at Allied Irish Banks landed in trouble last week for allegedly losing $750 million. Not all have seemed as colorful as NICHOLAS LEESON, who brought down Britain's prestigious Barings Bank with $1.4 billion in concealed losses.

The week before he disappeared, Nicholas Leeson kept throwing up in the bathroom at work. Colleagues didn't know why. He had been working hard, perhaps harder than usual... At the end of trading that [last] day, Leeson gathered up his notes,walked off the floor and began his getaway. By 11:30 that night, he was out of Singapore, checking into a hotel in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, 200 miles to the north. At 7 a.m. [the next day], his wife reportedly jumped into a cab and headed for the airport. In his wake lay a venerable 232-year-old British banking empire rendered suddenly and irretrievably insolvent; half the financial world was reeling in fear, the other half in astonishment. On his office desk was a handwritten note that said "I'm sorry." It seemed beyond imagining that a bank like Barings could be utterly undone, sapped of more than a billion dollars--nearly twice its available capital--in a few weeks of reckless financial gambling by a single person. How could such an illustrious institution come to such an ignominious end?

--TIME, March 13, 1995