City profiles
Bruno Iksil The former JP Morgan Chase trader known as the “London Whale” for the $6.2bn trading losses he inflicted on the bank in 2012 is longing for his day in court. “I have to retrieve my reputation, my intellectual property and, simply, my life,” Bruno Iksil told Financial News. The Frenchman claims that his managers at JP Morgan “repeatedly” instructed him to put on the trades. In 2012, he reached a deal with the US authorities to testify against his former colleagues, but no charges have been tabled. And since, under US law, proceedings must start within five years of the alleged wrongdoing, time is running out. Worried friends have told Iksil to move on. He says that is “impossible”. Everyone “wanted to behead me or destroy me or smash me… The truth has to be told.” The 90-year-old couturier is “a survivor of the golden age of haute couture”, says the FT. Hubert de Givenchy – a dashing aristocrat nicknamed the “Tarzan of Fashion”, because of his towering frame – “clothed the most beautiful women of an elegant time”, including, famously, Audrey Hepburn. Soon after founding his fashion house, in 1952, at the age of just 25, the newspaper L’express said that he “was to haute couture what Françoise Sagan was to literature”. When Givenchy sold his business to LVMH in 1988, “he was richer and more famous” than many of his customers. He’s outlived most of his contemporaries: this week, Christie’s Paris sold works by Diego and Alberto Giacometti from his collection; he saw the sale as a way of celebrating the oeuvre of departed friends.