I don’t deserve to be deported claims £1.4bn rogue trader
A CITY trader who gambled away £1.4billion in the UK’s biggest banking fraud yesterday said he should be allowed to stay in Scotland.
Kweku Adoboli has been bailed from detention pending a decision over his deportation to Ghana.
The 38-year-old returned to his home in Livingston, West Lothian, this week after being held for 36 days in an immigration centre near Heathrow Airport.
He was jailed for seven years in 2012 after bringing Swiss bank UBS to its knees by exceeding his trading limits.
Despite living in the UK since he was 12, as a foreign national sentenced to more than four years in jail Mr Adoboli is subject to automatic deportation under UK immigration laws.
He told the Mail yesterday that he had not applied for British citizenship in all his time here because he had been too busy at work handling billions of pounds of investments.
Mr Adoboli was found guilty at London’s Southwark Crown Court of two counts of fraud by abuse of position at UBS in 2012.
But he said: ‘I shouldn’t be deported because I’m British. In the eyes of the law I’m not officially British because I don’t have a piece of paper.
‘Our citizenship is not defined by a piece of paper. It’s defined by what we contribute to the community, our friends and our family.
‘Deportation is not meant to be double punishment. It’s supposed to protect the country from further harm. Instead we are just exporting our failures to other countries.
‘I went to prison and paid for my crime. I’m clearly rehabilitated and it’s never going to happen again.
‘I made a series of decisions that led to a loss for the bank. It was not to enrich ourselves. It was to further the bank’s position.’
Mr Adoboli, who took over a £50billion book at UBS, added: ‘I’ve been living in the country for ten years when I was advised by the bank’s lawyers to apply for a work permit in 2002. Then in 2008, they advised me to apply for indefinite leave to remain, which I was granted. I then had to apply for UK citizenship in 2009 but the problem was the passport.
‘I had to hand this over to the Home Office, which I couldn’t do as I was expected to travel with work.
‘The Home Office would have it for months.’
When asked by the Mail why he had not applied for citizenship, Mr Adoboli said he had only applied for indefinite leave to remain in 2008 after advice from the company’s lawyer.
The Nottingham University alumnus said he was ‘grateful’ for all the support he has had – such as a group of friends who appeared at a tribunal centre to provide a surety of £120,000.
But he said he was ‘quite broken’ from his time at the ‘hell-hole’ Harmondsworth immigration centre.
Mr Adoboli is now spending his time with his family and friends and is preparing for a judicial review on October 23.
A letter from 114 MPs and MSPs, including his local MP Hannah Bardell, asked Prime Minister Theresa May and Home Secretary Sajid Javid to intervene to stop his deportation.
Miss Bardell said: ‘I am delighted he’s been released. I am shocked and very angry it’s taken so long.
‘I have been in regular contact and visited him before he went into Harmondsworth. It’s great to have him back in Livingston but we’ve still got a long way to go.’
Mr Adoboli’s partner, Alice Gray, said: ‘I am really happy he’s back. It’s been very hard for him with what he’s had to go through.’