Almost five years ago, a friend of Kweku Adoboli sent him an email about Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader who had just lost 4.9 billion euros at French bank Société Générale.
Sarah Moore told him she saw "interesting parallels" with Adoboli's life, adding: "Please don't let me read about you in the papers in the same fashion. It would destroy my faith in human nature for ever." Her comments proved uncannily prescient.
Nine months later at UBS, Adoboli who was born in Ghana and educated in England, would embark on a similar path to that taken by Kerviel as he began to make unhedged trades and exposed the bank to huge risks, racking up losses of $2.3 billion – the largest unauthorised trading loss in British history.
Motivated by his desire to be a star trader, Adoboli managed to get away with his deception at the Swiss bank for more than three years.
Prosecutors have portrayed him as a "master fraudster" and reckless gambler – using payday loans and accumulating spread-betting losses of 123,000 British pounds ($195,515) in his personal life – who also "fraudulently gambled" with the bank's money, telling "carefully crafted, deliberate, detailed and sophisticated lies".
His activities ended only when he sent a "bombshell" email "confessing" to UBS last September.
The discovery could not have come at a worse time for UBS, which was then faltering in its attempts to rebuild its investment bank. Its near collapse in the financial crisis, when it wrote off $50billion in sour mortgage loans, was followed by a prolonged investigation into whether it helped wealthy US clients evade taxes, while it also became embroiled in the Libor manipulation scandal.
Effervescent and energetic, Adoboli was once a rising star at UBS, which he later was to call his "family".
His privileged upbringing was spent following his UN diplomat father around postings in Syria and Israel before being educated at a Quaker boarding school in Yorkshire, where he was head boy, and at Nottingham university.
Highly intelligent, articulate and with a natural charm and easy manner, Adoboli, 32, had seemed confident each day of the trial, surrounded by loyal friends and his father, John.
Character references read to the court from a former girlfriend and his ex-headmaster spoke of his honesty, generosity and dependability. Charles Sherrard QC, his defence counsel, told the jury that he was the "embodiment of a loyal, dedicated employee" and showed "devotion to the bank".
Adoboli worked in the back office before becoming a trader in 2006 with the exchange traded funds desk, where he was identified as a future leader by UBS's Ascent programme. His pay jumped from 95,000 pounds in 2007 to 360,000 pounds in 2010.
Glowing appraisals were read out during the trial, with Rob Pienaar of UBS prime broking describing him as an "accomplished salesman" who "could explain ETFs to my nan and she'd get it."
ETFs, which enable investors to gain exposure to a diverse range of asset classes, have been growing fast, although concerns have been raised about their increasingly exotic and opaque structures.
Kweku Adoboli, the former UBS trader, has been convicted of fraud at Southwark Crown Court. His unauthorised trading at the Swiss bank led to losses of $2.3 billion. This interactive timeline looks at key moments of how the fraud unravelled.
The pressures were huge. Adoboli, then aged 27, testified that in 2007 he and his co-worker John Hughes, 24, were left struggling to manage a $50 billion portfolio. He said: "Our book was massive – a tiny mistake could lead to huge losses. We were two kids trying to figure how this could work. We were losing so much money it was mental."
The pressures were huge. Adoboli, then aged 27, testified that in 2007 he and his co-worker John Hughes, 24, were left struggling to manage a $50 billion portfolio. He added: "Our book was massive – a tiny mistake could lead to huge losses. We were two kids trying to figure how this could work. We were losing so much money it was mental."
Like that of Kerviel, his deception started small. When he made a $400,000 loss on a trade in October 2008, he opted to hide the loss rather than tell his manager.
This, he testified, was when he formulated the mechanism, later dubbed the "umbrella", whereby profits were held off the books and earmarked to offset rising costs on the ETF desk by being drip-fed back into the desk's accounts.
By 2009 and 2010, Adoboli's scheme was going well and the umbrella's $40 million profit gave him confidence to do bigger trades.