Rogue currency trader Rusnak jailed for seven-and-a-half years

John Rusnak, the former foreign currency trader with Allied Irish Banks, was yesterday sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for masterminding one of the banking industry's biggest financial scandals.

The 38-year-old former trader pleaded guilty last October to concealing $691.2m (£430m) of losses on foreign currency deals in an elaborate five-year fraud to ensure he received salary and bonuses of more than $650,000 from AIB's Baltimore-based subsidiary, Allfirst Financial.

At sentencing yesterday, US District Judge William Nickerson also ordered the father of two to complete supervised probation and to pay $1,000 a month for five years after his release as well as undergo a programme of drug, alcohol and gambling counselling. The order allows the authorities to seize Rusnak's assets at any time and collect money should he profit from book deals or other enterprises.

Rusnak, who escaped the possibility of a much longer sentence by pleading guilty to a single count of felony bank fraud, was also barred from working at any federally insured bank without written approval from a government agency or financial institution. He told the judge that he was very sorry and accepted the sentence "without any bitterness".

The losses at Allfirst Financial were the biggest to be recorded in a case of unauthorised trading since Sumitomo Corp lost $2.6bn on copper trading in 1996 and Nick Leeson lost $1.4bn from Barings Bank a year earlier. Leeson served three-and-a-half years in prison for his part in the Barings scandal, which led to the bank's collapse and an industry-wide crackdown on trading practices.

Rusnak began running up the losses in 1997, four years after joining the bank, mostly from Yen trades that went wrong and spun out of control.

Although he did not directly profit from the losses, he protected his bonus payments by using fake telexes, high-risk option contracts and off balance sheet accounts with some of the world's biggest banks to make it look like the trades were profitable. By the time the fraud was uncovered, he had already collected bonuses of $433,000 with another $222,000 in the offing.