I am sure we will all breathe easier now that Jerome Kerviel, a former trader at Société Générale, a large French bank, has been convicted. The story is touted as a fitting conclusion to “one of the biggest business frauds in history”. Kerviel was sentenced to three years in jail and ordered to pay the bank 4.9 billion euros ($6.7 billion) in damages.

It’s a parody, a public relations scam by the bank, which the press vaguely claims “has worked to clean up its image and put in place tighter risk controls since the scandal broke in 2008.”

Kerviel, a 33-year-old former futures index trader, was found guilty on all counts, sentenced to five years in prison with two years suspended and fined €4.9bn, all the money the bank lost in liquidating the positions. of futures that he had opened on his behalf of. He was found guilty on charges of forgery, breach of trust and unauthorized use of computers to cover up almost €50 billion worth of bets between late 2007 and early 2008.

Do not misunderstand. I have no real opinion of the man.

I don’t know if he did something wrong, or if he really cheated on someone. She says that she was acting under implied orders. Maybe. But do I think his superiors at the bank had no idea that he had exposed them to a liability of perhaps hundreds of billions of euros? Absolutely not.

The French verdict exonerates all those superiors.

Kerviel earned about $150,000 a year, a paltry sum for a loathsome, bloated industry. The media has estimated that at his current salary, $3,150 a month, it would take Kerviel 177,536 years to pay the damages. But this number is ridiculously small, since it does not include income taxes, and how are judges going to be paid if taxes are not paid? And it doesn’t include interest.

And it’s based on Kerviel’s entire salary going into the bank with nothing left over for living expenses. The guy is not going to last 177,000 years without eating.

Obviously, the fine is “a delight” for the media and the public. But be aware that it has some insidious effects of a more material kind. By exonerating the bank from any culpability for its behavior, the court has signaled to the public that the bank’s behavior in tolerating rampant fraud was right with the legal system. And he has absolved the people above Kerviel of responsibility for the losses. Those were the guys who were making money from what he was doing.

They were also the guys who could have afforded to pay the money back.

That won’t happen now.

What will happen is that some rank-and-file soldier in the bankers’ greedy army will spend the next three years in jail and the rest of his life under the cloud of impossible debt.

And the real culprits will get another free ride.

Société Générale’s share price rose slightly on the news.