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Nick Leeson on The Voysey Inheritance

Nick Leeson, the rogue trader whose unchecked risk-taking caused the biggest financial scandal of the century, talks about the parallels between Edward's story in The Voysey Inheritance and his own.

The Weakness of Man

It's surprising how the dilemmas facing the human race rarely change. Equally surprising is how poorly some people respond to them, with no real attention to what has gone before. Are the lessons never learnt? Or is it simply that the personal price of admitting failure or the disgrace of a family scandal far outweigh the cost of coming clean? Many will have gone there before me and many will likely walk the same path in the future – people like Robert Maxwell and Joyti De-Laurey (the PA at Goldman Sachs) for instance. Our newspapers are never far away from the whiff of another financial scandal. From this magnificently observed portrait of an upper-middle-class family written in the early 1900s through my own escapades in the 1990s until the present day, the circumstances surrounding the central characters and the decisions that they have to face, are often largely the same. The way these intelligent, well schooled individuals react completely contradicts rationality and everything that they have been previously taught.

Whilst my own upbringing may not have been as highly principled as that of the play's central character, Edward, we both clearly knew the difference between right and wrong. I certainly did. I knew what I was doing was wrong; I knew that I shouldn't be doing it but continued all the same. The question is: why? Ethically correct in our upbringing, something misfires when we are confronted by the ultimate ethical dilemma. Each day I would do whatever was needed to survive, although I knew that each action contradicted what I knew was right.

In 1992, I arrived in Singapore, fresh-faced and fast-tracking a career in the senior management of the oldest English merchant bank. Almost immediately I was faced with a test of my basic honesty and integrity; rather embarrassingly, I failed that test. Unlike Edward, I didn't inherit the position but from the very first day that I hid a loss in the secret 88888 account, there was a choice of only two paths of action: to expose what was happening and suffer intense embarrassment, or to try and make good the losses by perpetuating the illegal activity.

In my mind, there was only one choice; admitting failure was never an option. I'd had the taste once or twice when an exam had gone the wrong way at school and I didn't much like it. Since leaving school I'd gone from success to success in my short business career and enjoyed the status that it attracted, both from family and work colleagues. Very quickly I became blinkered to all that was happening around me; everyone had bought into the success story and the important thing was to keep the myth – and in turn the status – alive at all costs. As much as I knew that I was wrong, I rarely paid attention to the impact my actions would have on those around me, or indeed to what the personal cost would ultimately be to me. Very quickly a form of tunnel vision descends that only allows you to see the future in terms of successfully digging yourself out of the situation. However bad it gets, failure is still never an option.

Edward would have grown up firmly in the shadow of his own father's supposed success and enjoyed all of the good things in life that were associated with it. Basking in admiration it would have been as difficult for his father to admit his shortcomings to his son, as for Edward to admit the real situation to his family.

Racked by guilt in the initial stages, the fear of exposure is always with you. As you manage to survive day-by-day, this dissipates somewhat but is never totally removed. Any knock on the door, any ring of the phone could be the start of your downfall and the onset of the most intense form of embarrassment that anyone is likely to experience. If you don't manage to successfully navigate yourself through these worst of times, not only will you suffer the embarrassment of failure but the exposure of the fact that everyone has been living a lie. This ultimate form of deceit will be the most difficult to bear and strain the toughest of relationships.

In the end I couldn't stop it myself. I'd turn up for work, day-in, day-out, and survive for the next 24 hours, hoping for the miracle that was increasingly unlikely to arrive. However bad it got, I couldn't stop, I couldn't bring an end to what was happening, face my own failure and admit what had happened to anyone else. When that day did arrive, none of it was my own doing. As I stepped on to the tarmac at Frankfurt airport and was arrested by the border police, their action signalled the beginning of the end for me.

For Edward, there seems a glimmer of hope that he may get away with it. Although one thing's for certain – it won't be unscathed: the decisions he's made have fundamentally changed both Edward and each of his relationships. And there's no going back.

© Nick Leeson, March 2006