As foreign students made for the language schools of the west of Ireland city of Galway and tourists headed for the Aran Islands, amid the gentle throng a man called Nick Leeson completed his first week’s work for a decade. It is the same Nick Leeson who was, briefly, the most wanted man on the planet. Leeson is now the commercial director of Galway United.
”There was an advert in one of the local papers,” he said, matter-of-factly. ”There are a lot of businesses that wouldn’t touch me. I didn’t think I’d have the precise skills for the job but it combined an interest of mine — football — with a chance to get some structure back into my life.”
Football has had its fair share of reckless speculators down the years but none on Leeson’s scale. Ten years ago last month his rogue trading on Singapore’s stock exchange brought down the oldest merchant bank in the world, Barings of London. Leeson, then 28, had gambled and lost £862-million, which is even more than Peter Ridsdale splurged at Leeds United. Barings could not sustain the losses and collapsed.
Leeson ran away. He was eventually caught in Frankfurt. Extradited back to Singapore, he spent four years and four months inside Changi prison. His marriage dissolved while he way inside and he discovered he had the same form of cancer that had killed his mother.
On release, he returned to England, studied for a psychology degree and met an Irishwoman named Leona. He followed her to Galway where, remarried, clear of cancer and with an eight-month baby boy, Leeson has been for the past two years. And now he has a job again.
Galway United inhabit the second tier of the League of Ireland, a semi-professional outfit he compared in scale to St Albans or Hayes, clubs with whom the Watford-born Leeson has connections. As of last Monday his role is to find sponsors for things such as the match ball at Galway’s Terryland Park. It is a long way from Raffles Hotel.
”Galway United would admit they are in a transitional period,” he said, sitting in an Asian restaurant near Wolfe Tone Bridge. ”But they have a five-year plan: they want to win the Premier League and challenge for Europe. If you look at it, all the board members are successful individually; they want to get the management right. There are a lot of clubs in England that have been successful for a while but have then succumbed to chronic mismanagement. Leeds United are a good example.”
Released from prison in July 1999, Leeson became popular on the after-dinner speaking circuit. Leeds were the one club who invited him to speak. Management — or mismanagement — is his strong point. Just as people at Elland Road would ask why no one ever checked Ridsdale’s operations, the same happened to Leeson at Barings.
”I’ve seen the movie [Rogue Trader] on a couple of occasions and it makes the management of the bank look like a bunch of idiots. With hindsight, I have to concur. The way I reacted was fairly stupid too, but there wasn’t that common-sense management to question some of the stuff I was doing. There were 50 people doing the same sort of job as me in the organisation.
”They might make between £10 000 and £15 000 a day; on certain days I’d make £4-million to £5-million. It makes you think they’d look at the exception. They didn’t, they looked at the others.”
Does mismanagement in football make it vulnerable to something more sinister than incompetence?
”Yes. The idea of money laundering is to put dirty money into something and take a reduced, clean amount out. These people are quite happy to lose some along the way. The financial markets are one method they use to wash it and it’s well known. So why not at a football club? Whenever someone is prepared to invest a lot of money you have to ask where it comes from.”
Leeson then warned of the obligatory ”Far East consortium” that seems to be associated with every potential football takeover.
”Asia is a place of rumours but there is definitely interest. The prestige for anyone in Asia to be associated with one of the big four clubs in England is massive. A lot depends on where the money is coming from. If it’s from the UAE, I would suggest the money is there. If it’s coming from a consortium based out in Malaysia or Thailand you have to question if the money is really there. When Thailand was associated with Liverpool it always looked a bit far-fetched.”
A Manchester City fanatic, Leeson said: ”Football has always been a thread through my life. I was a left-back or centre-half. I used to train with Hayes. When I was at St Albans, Iain Dowie’s brother Bob was there. When I came back [from prison] I was actually going to do a coaching badge with Bob. I spoke to Graham Taylor about doing a bit of football in the community [at Watford].
Assessing his entry into football at Galway as ”embryonic; if that leads on to something then all well and good”, Leeson seems content with his fresh structure in a place where one local-paper headline is ”Council fears chip fat is clogging city pipes”. He knows, though, that a low boredom threshold is one of his characteristics. Reminiscing, he then told a story that encompassed the Far East, football, money and his own failings.
”I appreciate good football but one team I can’t watch are Man United. When I was in jail in Singapore — and there is not much you can do to amuse yourself in a maximum security prison — the inmates loved to bet. It wasn’t much because you got paid 60p a week but there was an active market for the football. Every weekend people would want to have a bet and they would want to back Man United.
”Every week I could never bring myself to do it. The worst was when they won the European Cup final. I was being released in July 1999; United played Bayern Munich in May. If you get caught watching the football you get locked up 24 hours a day. But I only had six weeks to go so I had the football on that evening.
”Everybody came down, we all had bets and I’d bet heavily against Man United. We had people positioned so that none of the guards caught us. There was me and a Liverpool fan and about 100 United fans. For 88 minutes the two of us were giving it to them. Then it was devastating. I was the other side of the bet. I lost fortunes. Yeah, I know, I didn’t stop.” — Â