A suspected rogue trader has been arrested in a pre-dawn raid in London after Swiss banking giant UBS discovered £1.3 billion worth of unauthorised deals.
The 31-year-old man, named by sources as Kweku Adoboli, was arrested at his desk by City of London police at 3.30am on suspicion of fraud by abuse of position and remains in custody.
UBS, which has 6,000 staff in the UK, saw its shares slide 10% after it warned the activity could have tipped the bank to a third-quarter loss.
Oswald Gruebel, UBS chief executive, called the loss "distressing" and said he "will spare no effort to establish how it happened".
City of London Police commander Ian Dyson said the force was tipped off by UBS at 1am after the alleged rogue trade surfaced.
Adoboli is listed as director of Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) and Delta-1 Trading at UBS Investment Bank in his profile on LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals.
He graduated from the University of Nottingham with a BSc (Hons) in e-commerce and digital business in 2003 and, according to the Financial Services Authority register, started with UBS in 2006 as a trainee investment adviser.
In a short statement, the bank said: "UBS has discovered a loss due to unauthorised trading by a trader in its investment bank.
"The matter is still being investigated, but UBS's current estimate of the loss on the trades is in the range of two billion US dollars.
"It is possible that this could lead UBS to report a loss for the third quarter of 2011. No client positions were affected."
