Jerome Kerviel a victim in Societe Generale case

It takes a lot to turn a banker into a global icon of victimhood. 
It takes even more when that banker is a trader in index futures - the very essence of the casino banking which brought the world financial system down in 2008. 
The French justice system has achieved this miracle in the sentence it passed this week on the "rogue trader", Jerome Kerviel, who came close to bankrupting his employer, the French bank Societe Generale, with €50 billion of unauthorised trades. Kerviel was found guilty of defrauding his employer and ordered to pay €4.9 billion to the bank.
This is an unimaginable sum of money - Dh25 billion - for any individual to pay. No one expects Kerviel to pay the money back. But the sentence is a clear sign that, in the eyes of the law, the bank shares none of the guilt for the lapses which almost brought it down. 
In the eyes of the world, however, the law is an ass. The bank's controls over traders have been criticised by the French banking regulator as lax. How otherwise could even a computer genius hide the fact that he was gambling away the bank?
Kerviel did not benefit from the unauthorised trades. He is no Bernie Madoff, who defrauded thousands of investors of billions of dollars in the world's largest Ponzi scheme. There is no hidden stash of gold. 
Kerviel was an ambitious young man, the son of a metal worker, who was desperate to succeed as a trader. He just tried too hard, in a culture which offered huge rewards for risk. 
Commentators and bloggers immediately denounced the sentence as unfair and disproportionate, and cast Kerviel as a scapegoat for a fundamentally corrupt system. His lawyer, Olivier Metzner, said: "French justice cannot challenge the financial system or indeed any institutions. All the blame must be placed on the back of one man, not on the system."
Senior French politicians have weighed in to dismiss the sentence as ridiculous. 
Gerard Longuet, a close associate of President Nicolas Sarkozy, said it was "a bit surprising for one man to carry the entire and exclusive responsibility" for the bank's losses when its management was clearly at fault. 
How did the rogue trader achieve this outpouring of sympathy? Certainly not thanks to charm. Taciturn and geeky, Kerviel cannot help exuding an air of arrogance. Some have seen a nasty whiff of hypocrisy in the press coverage. 
"Two weeks ago, the press was calling for all traders to go before a firing squad. Now when one gets into trouble, he's a national hero," one wrote on the website of Le Monde.
Part of the reason is the long-standing distrust among the French public for its elites and the rich in general. 
But there is a wider issue here that explains why Kerviel has acquired an undeserved Robin Hood-like aura around the world. There is an unsettling trend of big institutions escaping blame for their mistakes, while the little guy gets it in the neck. We see it especially with the banks. The spirit of the age, led by reality television, demands public displays of contrition from wrong-doers, who ideally should be shamed before the court of public opinion. But the bank chiefs whose collective recklessness led the world into a deep recession have avoided that.
They may have lost their jobs and moved on to other things, but in the end they have escaped a public reckoning. They never appear in public except with a posse of PR people and lawyers to coach them so that they do not admit any wrongdoing. 
These untouchable titans have a public obligation to explain themselves: many of them have received tax-payers' money in the form of bail-outs, and all benefit from ultra-low interest rates, which enable them to make large profits and award eye-popping bonuses.
Of course they have good reasons for keeping quiet: any acknowledgement of guilt could trigger a blizzard of law suits. But such concerns carry no weight at the level of popular feeling. And popular feeling deserves a hearing, for it is tax-payers' money and the beneficence of governments which keeps the banks in business. 
The spirit of "never apologise, never explain" is taking root in ever more areas of public life, not just business but politics too. Part of the reason is that news moves so fast these days. If the media can be stalled for a few days, then something else will turn up to distract the public's fickle attention.
We can see this with two defeated political parties - the Republicans in the US and the Labour Party in Britain. Both bear the blame, as much as the bankers, for the excesses which led to the financial crash. But we do not see them atoning. They have skilfully moved the agenda on. Even though Labour was in power in Britain until May, its rule seems like ancient history. On both sides of the Atlantic, the current administrations get the blame for dealing with the mistakes of the previous government.
The Kerviel case has become so prominent because, due to the slowness of the legal process, it marks a clear occasion when blame can be seen to be wrongly apportioned. The law is out of step with the image-making process. 
But for this trial, Societe Generale, with its advertising campaign to personalise its banking services, could have made the world forget the near catastrophe of 2008. Even though it won the case, the net effect has been to make the bank look like a bully. It must dearly hope that Kerviel is speedily forgotten.
It is a pity that the big parties and the big corporations have learned how not to say sorry. A bit of conscience searching is good for public life. It would inspire more confidence in the political and business elites.
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