Nick Leeson, the man responsible for the collapse of UK’s oldest merchant bank, resurfaced as a professional online poker player for Celebpoker.com.

According to a news article on FinExtra, online poker has become the rogue trader’s main source of income after earning notriety at Barings Bank. Leeson was introduced to online poker by former footballer Vinnie Jones, he says what started out as a hobby has become a lucrative side-line.

In 1995 Leeson was jailed for six-and-a-half years for his part in the collapse of the UK’s Barings Bank. Whilst working as an investment operations officer for Barings in Singapore, Leeson racked up losses of $1.3bn by making massive bets on interest rate movements. When the accounting fraud was discovered by Barings executives Leeson went on the run. Barings eventually crashed and was bought for just £1 by Dutch banking group ING.

Despite the $25,000 win at CelebPoker, Leeson claims to have learned from his mistakes and says he generally avoids gambling big money on the site.

"The returns on the money can be phenomenal but I am well aware that I can lose too, so I won’t be repeating the mistakes I made in the past," he was quoted by the article.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Online Poker, Poker Players. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.