Rogue trader ordered to pay 4.9bn euros after fraud case

His lawyer immediately declared he would appeal.

Olivier Metzner said Kerviel was "disgusted" with the verdict and sentence.

He said the Paris court found Kerviel's employers bank Societe Generale "was responsible for nothing, not responsible for the creature that it had created."

He added: "I have the feeling Jerome Kerviel is paying for an entire system."

Kerviel, 33, a former futures trader, was found guilty of forgery, breach of trust and unauthorised computer use for covering up bets worth nearly 50bn euros between late 2007 and early 2008.

He maintained that the bank accepted his massive risk-taking as long as it made money.The ruling marked a huge victory for Societe Generale, one of France's most established banks, which has worked to clean up its image and put in place tougher risk controls since the scandal broke.

Kerviel stood expressionless as the court convicted him.

The 4.9bn euros it ordered him to pay was the amount lost unwinding his complex positions in January 2008. He will almost certainly be unable to pay it.

While at the bank, he took home a salary and bonus of less than 100,000 euros – relatively modest in the financial world.

Kerviel, a soft-spoken man from western Brittany, is seen by some in France as being a scapegoat for powerful corporate interests.

During the proceedings, both sides admitted to mistakes but Kerviel insisted his bank superiors knew what he was doing. Societe Generale's former chairman acknowledged there were problems in monitoring the trader's work.

An internal report by the bank found managers failed to follow up on 74 different alarms about Kerviel's activities.

Kerviel started at Societe Generale in 2000 and worked his way up from a supporting role in an office monitoring trades to a job on the futures desk where he invested by hedging on European equity market indices.