UBS trader Adoboli gambled away £2.3bn

A trader "gambled away" $2.3 billion (1.75 billion euros) of Swiss bank UBS's money, causing "chaos and disaster", his trial in London heard on Friday. Kweku Adoboli, 32, traded beyond his permitted limits at the bank's offices in London because he was trying to earn a bigger bonus and wanted to boost his ego, a prosecution lawyer told the court. Adoboli thought he had the "magic touch" but his actions rocked UBS, lawyer Sasha Wass told the jury as she outlined the case against the Ghanaian-born son of a former United Nations official. "He is on trial because he lost his bank 2.3 billion US dollars. He fraudulently gambled it away. He also in doing so wiped around 10 percent or about 4.5 billion US dollars off the bank's share price," Wass told the jury. "He did all of this by exceeding his trading limits, by inventing fictitious deals to conceal this and then he lied to his bosses. "Mr Adoboli's motive for this behaviour was to increase his bonus, his status within the bank, his job prospects and of course his ego. "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." Adoboli denies two charges of fraud and two charges of false accounting relating to a period between October 2008 and September last year, when he was arrested. UBS is not represented in the trial, but is bracing itself for potentially uncomfortable revelations about its supervision of staff.