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Business

‘Ordinary’ Kerviel’s extraordinary trial opens

In a media-packed Paris courtroom, a French judge gazed down at the accused rogue trader who nearly brought down Société Générale bank and asked commandingly: “Who are you, Monsieur Kerviel? Answer the question.”

The soft-spoken Jerome Kerviel on trial in a $7.2 billion trading scandal says he’s just an “ordinary” boy from the provinces who “hid nothing” from his bosses because they knew what he was doing.

Kerviel, 33, soared to global notoriety two years ago after being branded by France’s second-largest bank as a genius rogue trader who tricked sophisticated managers and triggered huge losses on complicated futures contracts.

Kerviel took the stand yesterday to defend himself against charges of fraud, faking documents and hacking into his bank’s computers to wage the alleged scam. The bank said it caused losses of 5.6 billion euros in January 2008, which at the time were valued at $7.2 billion.

Eventually, the bank wrote off about half the losses, but it wants to recover the balance — as well as have Kerviel jailed for five years.

Three judges pored over Kerviel’s psychological evaluation, his performance reviews and even his long-ago internships in search of his deeper identity. There is no jury for the trial, which is expected to last through the month.

Unlike Wall Streeters with Ivy League degrees and multimillion-dollar paychecks, Kerviel was reared in a modest country village in France by his hairdresser mom. He said he never earned more than $145,000, including bonuses, as a mid-level trader at SocGen.

The bank’s lawyers portrayed Kerviel as being jealous of upper-class colleagues with aristocratic pedigrees and elite university degrees, and pulled off his crimes as revenge. The bank’s then-CEO Daniel Bouton called Kerviel a “terrorist.”

When Judge Dominique Pauthe questioned Kerviel whether he was an ordinary man, he answered, “Absolutely!” With Post wires