Kweku Adoboli returns to the financial scene. Nor in London, where the trader had lost more than 2
billion dollars to UBS in 2011, but in Ghana, his country of birth, to which he was deported at the end of 2018.
The financier had been sentenced in 2012 to 7 years in prison for fraud and had served half of his sentence. Sound
New objective: to create a market for securitised bonds in the West African country.
At 39 years old, Kweku Adoboli has great ambitions for his country of origin, which he left at the age of 4 and
in which he returned, coerced and forced, at the end of 2018. The former UBS trader wants to raise $6 million
(the equivalent in francs) to launch a real estate financing platform. More precisely, a platform
mortgage securitization, he told Bloomberg, which met him at a large hotel in
Accra, the Ghanaian capital.
This platform should make it possible to finance more real estate, in a country whose population should
double in the next 30 years, according to Kweku Adoboli. The government estimates that it is missing 2
million homes in Ghana.
Mortgage activity is growing little in Ghana, where interest rates are high and the banking sector is < recovers from a seizure. Kweku Adoboli estimates that 2.5 million households can afford to borrow $50<000/> for a house, according to a study he carried out with his partners (whose identity has not been revealed).
"Responsible for others" at UBS
Regarding his setbacks at UBS, the former trader acknowledges that he still has a lot to do to regain the
trust of others, even if he claims to have "assumed a responsibility because no one wanted to take it".
The day he pays his first profit to a customer "will be a great day," he also says.
During his trial in 2012, he claimed to have acted with the bank's approval, to hide some of his
transactions by keeping parallel accounts. The prosecution had argued that he had acted alone and lied. One
week after the verdict, Finma published a damning report for UBS, which was deemed to be failing in its
controls and understanding of operations. S.RU.