According to the news, Leeson

How do you blow I billion? With that much money, you could buy every jewel in Tiffany’s, collect a small fleet of 747s... or bankrupt a vulnerable bank. That’s what Nicholas Leeson apparently did. The 2g-year-old trader for British investment house Barings PLC. in Singapore staked more than 1 billion of the company’s money last winter on Japanese derivatives, and got tsunamied. For weeks he tried to recoup his mounting losses with double-or-nothing bets and doctored bookkeeping. He was arrested in Frankfurt on his way to London. Germany extradited him to Singapore last month, where he was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison. Leeson is appealing.