Fallen Financier Jérôme Kerviel's Long Walk

As long as Jérôme Kerviel keeps walking, he says he can forget about the €4.9 billion ($6.8 billion) loss that France’s Société Générale says he’s responsible for—and the three years of jail time he faces for the crime. “I thought about it every day for six years, but since I started this walk I haven’t even once,” he said as he made his way through forests, vineyards, and auto repair shops in the Tuscan countryside on an 870-mile trek from Rome to Paris. On March 19, France’s highest appeals court upheld his conviction for the 2008 trading fraud, though it challenged the bank’s assertion that Kerviel was solely responsible for the full extent of the loss. Despite that small victory, within a few weeks Kerviel will be ordered to start the prison term handed down after a 2012 appeal.

The 37-year-old former trader admits exceeding trading limits, faking documents, and entering false data into computers, but says his superiors turned a blind eye as long as his trades made money. He has argued that the loss was exaggerated as Société Générale dumped his holdings in a panic and surreptitiously added failing subprime mortgages to the total, attributing those losses to Kerviel. “When I first saw my face on a TV screen with a €5 billion loss attached, I had no idea what they could have been talking about,” he says over morning coffee, rolls, and several Marlboros in a €50-a-night hotel outside Florence. “I still don’t.”