So much for moral hazard!
A Vienna court on Friday sentenced a 73-year-old former Austrian bank executive to nearly ten years in jail for losing more than $2 billion of supposedly secure funds in the Refco debacle and lying about it to his board of directors and investors.
Interestingly, it’s not clear how much Helmut Elsner would have gained beyond ego gratification if the risky play had panned out.
A flamboyant character known for strutting around Vienna as if he owned the city, Elsner ran BAWAG, a bank charged with conservatively managing money for workers’ unions – and seemed to get off on playing hard ball with the big boys of derivatives.
Though mandated to seek board approval for all investments, Elsner secretly worked with US-based fund manager Wolfgang Floettl (who was sentenced to just over two years) to loan money to Refco and then take an ownership stake in the troubled company, ultimately going down with the Refco ship and, finally, being convicted of of breach of trust, fraud and false accounting.
His actions, like those of his 67-year-old successor, Helmut Zwettler (sentenced to five years), seem to more closely resemble those of rogue traders than of big-league corporate fraudsters like the Enron gang.
While it's always risky to go into the heads of people so far away, it does appear that Elsner and Zwettler wanted to catapult their enterprise into the stratosphere and bask in the shared glory – and to have believed they knew better than the stodgy board they had been sworn to serve.
Whatever the motives, however, the damage is the same.