Trading places

JACKIE HAYDEN: How did you end up in Galway?

NICK LEESON: Quite simply, my wife Leona lived here for 10 or 11 years with two children from a previous relationship. Both children go to Irish-speaking school out in Barna. So it was easier for me to come here with no attachments than for them to move to London.
Have you always been interested in soccer?

Always. I’ve played since a very early age, for schools teams, county league teams. It’s always been an interest of mine, both playing and watching. I was in Galway a while when I saw the job with Galway United advertised in the Galway Advertiser. Our son Mackenzie is only 10 months old and we’re going to be around here for the foreseeable future and going for this job was very much to see what the response would be.
Having been on the receiving end of a lot of CVs myself over the years I knew there was every chance it’d get filed in the dustbin, but it piqued their interest enough.
Was the club aware of your history?

Of course! There’s no way to avoid it when there’s a 10-year gap in my CV. You either make it up or confront it head-on. My style is to confront it.
Might they see your profile as an advantage?

To a degree, maybe it had some bearing, no pun intended, Jackie, but I don’t think it was an over-riding factor, because you still need to get the job done, like getting the sponsorship in. But you’d have to ask them. It’s a fairly new board, they’re fairly progressive and it’s very readily apparent that they want to succeed. Success is important to me as well as a barometer, so our aims coincide.
But you haven’t had a great season so far?

No, we didn’t start too well, but it’s picked up for the last few matches and we did well against [premier division] teams. We’ve won two games on the trot now, but that has nothing to do with me! I only deal with the commercial side. But it’s all about building.
There’s plenty there to convince me the club can compete at the highest level. We made a new signing last week, Eric Levine from Longford Town, and he scored the winning goal in our last match. So things are on the up and the team doesn’t have to be successful to get the commercial side right. It’s not a prerequisite that the team does well. Only 10% of the money needed will come through the gate.
Is local support good?

Local support is difficult, and the west of Ireland is probably more difficult than most of the rest of Ireland. Gaelic sports have a bit of a stranglehold, although soccer through the Premiership is a widely watched sport, but it’s difficult to get those people to come through the gates. We have to find ways to attract families, children and everybody else.
So what have you planned to raise funds?

We’re planning a concert with Aslan, Hothouse Flowers, Brian Kennedy and The Conway Sisters. It’s very much a learning curve for me. We also have a celebrity five-a-side competition at the ground on 13 August and we’re looking for a few more corporate teams for that. We already have Coronation Street, Ros na Run, Fair City and Hector’s All-Stars.
What about the standard of Irish football?

It’s good. Obviously all the players at Galway United are part-time, compared to some of the professional sides in the premier division here. But I didn’t think that was apparent against Cork [City] in the FAI Cup. I think we gave them a fantastic game and we were very unlucky.
Do you think Irish football has anything to learn from big business?

With implementation of the new UEFA licenses, all football clubs have to be run as a business now. That’s not the way it’s been in the past. A lot of clubs have tried to buy success, and there’s very few can do that. Chelsea is probably the only successful example that springs to mind. A benefactor like Roman Abramovich probably comes along once in a life-time. Look at Leeds United’s fall from grace. Wrexham bought in players like Mickey Thomas and that didn’t work either. It’s a recipe for disaster. If you don’t have the infrastructure and the business in place, you’re gonna fall flat on your face eventually.
Can that happen here?

You hear more and more about that happening in Irish football. I hear rumours of Shelbourne paying players’ salaries to keep them on the bench so that other teams can’t have them. That can’t continue for too long. The financial implications are too severe. Crowds aren’t big enough to support that kind of excess.
Is it damaging the game?

Of course. Sure. Compliance with UEFA licenses will be of paramount importance in Ireland over the next couple of years. Clubs are struggling to comply with them.
Before the start of the season there was the possibility of a couple of clubs not getting their UEFA licenses. But if a club has a benefactor prepared to plough limitless amounts of money into it they are always going to be able to attract the best players.
That’s an anomaly of the free market. I wouldn’t suggest it should be anything different, but we’ve seen with Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United how they dominate the Premiership.
But there are success stories too, like Everton last year. Cork City is a great model that Galway United could emulate. They have great week-on-week support, they’re at the top of the Premier League, they’re in Europe. That’s where we wanna be.
How do you view the Malcolm Glazer takeover of Manchester United?

(laughs) I hate Man United, so I don’t mind! I’m a Man City supporter.
So you see it as a negative?

I do. You need football people within the club as well. You can’t bulldoze your way through and come at it purely from a business perspective. Rupert Lowe was one of the first guys I worked for at Barings Bank. He’s now chairman of Southampton FC and you can tell he’s not a football man by the way he’s hired and fired managers.
You need a good split of football people and business people. To impose three of the Glazer family on the Man U board with over-riding control is dangerous. Even from a business perspective, you have to question Glazer’s financial dealings with the club burdened with a lot of debt they didn’t have before.
Would you work for him?

No. I wouldn’t work for Man United if it was the last place on earth! I’d do nothing associated with them.
If you were offered the chance to become involved with Manchester City on a commercial level would you see that as a challenge?
?I see Galway United as a great challenge! But what I like about that challenge is that it’s achievable. In my former career my targets have always been sky-high, and that may have been a problem.
Nothing was ever enough, and I’ve had to temper that. But I’m very happy in the west of Ireland and I don’t see myself moving back to the UK anytime soon. There are lots of positives about Galway. It’s thriving. It’s a big city without the usual inner-city problems.
Do you have to live with the Barings Bank collapse following you around forever?

Yeah, but I’m a very grounded, realistic person. I don’t engage in wishful thinking or blaming it on other people. I did it and I have to accept the responsibility and move on. But to go on feeling sorry for myself or the bank or anybody involved in the fiasco would be negative. I’d end up a manic depressive.
But you don’t mind talking about it either?

No, I don’t. It’s definitely the most embarrassing period of my life. I’ve had to come to terms with it and live with it. It’s always gonna to be that way. I don’t think I could do anything so bad again! Maybe, I’ll astonish myself!
Have you any sense of people not trusting you?

No. But there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek media stuff. I don’t mind that. I do a lot of after-dinner speaking and I’ll joke about it.
I say that my wife looks after our bank account and she shops in Tescos, because I’d probably lose the money while I’m walking around. A cheap laugh every now and then is fine. I was on a radio show the other day and a guy phoned in to say ‘I’ve just moved into to your mum and dad’s old house in Watford. Is there any mileage in digging up the garden?’
But there must have been times when it wasn’t funny?

Sure. There weren’t many funny moments in Singapore during the three years of the bank’s collapse and then four and a half years in prison.
But I look back on the prison time since being released in 1999 and that seven years seems like a minuscule period of time now. At the time it was absolutely never-ending. I thought there was no way I could get through it.
Struggling to rescue the Barings Bank situation must have been very stressful?

Oh yeah. Well, you’re living a lie. Every day you go to work you’re trying to cover up everything. I had an overpowering need for status. If you’re at home with your wife watching the TV you’re worrying about it.
You can’t have a moment’s peace. Rogue Trader was the first book I wrote about it and if you look at the pictures and compare how I looked when I first went to Singapore and how I looked at the end there’s a big difference.
That’s the stress. In fact Virgin have just published a book I wrote with the psychologist Ivan Tyrrell on stress. It’s called Back From The Brink.
Have you used drugs to alleviate the stress?

No. Because I never smoked cigarettes, I never tried marijuana.
How about cocaine?
?Yeah, I’ve done some of that.
In Singapore?
?No, you don’t get good cocaine in Singapore. You mainly get weak-grade heroin there and little else. But I didn’t try any drug until I was 32 years old in Bali after I was released from prison. I tried ecstasy and magic mushrooms in Bali and cocaine in England. It’s something I have to be careful about as I’m fairly compulsive. If I go out drinking I’m more likely to have 10 beers rather than two. So drugs would be deadly with me.
The Changhi jail you were sent to in Singapore has a pretty awful reputation. How did you find it?

I wasn’t actually in Changhi. I was in Tanahmerah which is next door and far more secure, lots of CCTV cameras.
What was the worst part of it all?

The grey areas, not knowing exactly what was going to happen, not knowing what’s going on, not being certain. I went through six months when I was first arrested with wild speculation as to what my sentence would be, from seven years to 84 years. That was worse than the real sentence of six and a half years.
What were the worst aspects of life in prison?

Again the grey areas. For nine months I didn’t hear from my wife. I didn’t know what was going on. You try to focus on things you rely on, but I didn’t know if my marriage still existed.
So in the end I had to front that out myself and say to her, "if you want a divorce you can have it," because it was easier for me to deal with the fact that there’s nothing than deal with the uncertainty that was breaking me.
What else do you recall from prison?

A guard used to come around every morning at seven o’clock and turn the water on and then at eight o‘clock he’d turn it off. Nine times out of 10 the water wouldn’t come, but he’d still turn it off. I’d get really upset and throw things at the wall or want to beat him up. But the only person I was damaging was myself.
Lots of people, such as the former British MP Jonathan Aitken, have found God in prison. Did you ever get to that stage?

No. But I used religion to my advantage. You could get out of your cell for an extra hour if you went to church on a Sunday, so I did that, but otherwise not. I’m not an atheist. But I only believe in what I can see for myself. If I was going to embrace some form of religion, the challenge should be to do that when you’re strong, not when you’re at your lowest ebb.
I’d never tell Mike Tyson that his conversion to the Muslim faith was ridiculous, but people converting in prison and searching for some sort of meaning is wrong. Prison is about accepting responsibility for what you’ve done. The Buddhists love this idea that you’re always paying back for your previous life. Maybe it makes people feel better about themselves.
When you came out of prison, what did you think you were coming out to?

I didn’t know. My view on what I might be doing was always short-term. I knew I was going to have to do a press release. I knew that when I got to Heathrow they were going to give me an injunction for £100 million. I knew I had to do an interview with the Daily Mail. But thereafter it was a void.
Did you accept you were going to face intense publicity arriving back from Singapore and would you have preferred to have hidden away somewhere?

Being hidden away would have been wishful thinking, which I’m not into. That wasn’t gonna happen. In prison I didn’t really know how much notoriety I….well, enjoyed isn’t the word, but that I managed or experienced. But it was still a great shock when I got to a Heathrow full of photographers trying to grab a picture and journalists trying to get a story. But then it died down a bit. Then it flared up again when I took the job at Galway United, with Sky News and RTE covering it.
How did you feel you were treated by the British tabloids?

Half the time I don’t even bother reading the newspapers. When I was first arrested in Germany after I left Singapore to fly back to Britain, every newspaper in the world was running stories from very limited sources. Newspapers got things wrong. The tabloids try to sensationalise everything anyway, but the biggest-selling broadsheet newspaper in Britain ran a front-page expose about me having £50 million in a secret bank account in Germany. It was completely false. Completely.
But the police, the inspectors, the liquidators, eight of them altogether, came to me the following day in the jail asking me about this secret bank account. I explained that I had no bank account in Germany, secret or otherwise. I said, “Go back and ask the newspaper to give you a copy of the bank statement and bring it back to me”. So they went back to the newspaper and obviously got nothing.
Did you ever find out where the story came from?
?Well, I've since met the editor for lunch in London and he asked me “Did we get anything wrong?” I said, “You got plenty wrong. But the most damaging was that story about the secret bank account in Germany.” He said, “I had a private investigator working for me in Germany, who gave me cast-iron leads before and I believed everything he told me.” I said, “So you’re telling me you never saw the bank statement either?” and he said, “No”. That editor doesn’t work there any more.
Were there any similar stories?

The same newspaper ran a big story in their financial section claiming I was earning a double commission from two different clients. It wasn’t me. It was a guy in Tokyo, but he didn’t make great copy, so they put my name to it.
Might this be part of the punishment?

No, I don’t see it that way. I’m not a bitter person. You can sit here and talk to me and get a first-hand impression of me good or ill, but 95% of people can only go on what they get through other people. Unfortunately terms like ‘rogue trader’ and ‘disgraced banker’ nearly always precede my name.
How did you feel about the film made about your life?

It’s hard for me to judge. I watched it twice, once with Sir David Frost and Ben Kingsley. We drank a load of Becks and everybody got fairly drunk. Half of my friends cried and half of them laughed. I just got drunk with David Frost. But I don’t think the film did me any disservice.
Do you think there might be other Nick Leesons out there in banks?

Yeah, you’ve had John Rusnak at Allied Irish Banks and there was a rogue trader over a year ago at National Australia Bank and another at the beginning of the year in China Aviation Oil in Singapore. The theme running through them all is that they happen in organisations that were poorly run, where the controls are not good enough. It’s clear that’s what happened at Barings and at Allied Irish Banks, regardless of what [AIB chief executive] Michael Buckley may say.
So the Barings Bank saga could happen again?

Not to the same extent. They gave me £500 million in Singapore. The bank was only worth £250 million. An eight-year-old could do the sums.
Would you go back to banking?

No, and I don’t think banking would want me to come back either!