Kareem Serageldin | |
---|---|
Born | 1973 (age 50–51) |
Education | Yale University (1994) |
Known for | The only American to serve jail time as a result of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 |
Kareem Serageldin ( /ˈsɛrəɡɛldɪn/) (born in 1973) is a former executive at Credit Suisse. He is notable for being the only banker in the United States to be sentenced to jail time as a result of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, a conviction resulting from mismarking bond prices to hide losses. [1] [2]
Serageldin was born in Cairo, Egypt to parents of modest means. He moved to the United States as a child and spent most of his childhood in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. [3] [2] He graduated from Yale University in 1994. [4]
Upon graduating in 1994, he joined the information technology department of Credit Suisse. [2] He moved to London 4 years later to work in the bank's catastrophe bonds business. [2] [3] By age 33, he was named the global head of structured credit. [5] By 2007, he was supervising 70 employees and more than $50 billion in trading positions. [3] Despite earning approximately $7 million per year, Serageldin lived modestly; his apartment overlooking London Victoria station was described by his friends as "a grown-up dorm room". [2]
By early 2008, he was fired from Credit Suisse and was reported to the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York for falsifying records. [2]
On February 1, 2012, Serageldin was charged by Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation [6] as well as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. [7]
On April 12, 2013, Serageldin pleaded guilty to fraudulently inflating the prices of asset-backed bonds which comprised subprime residential mortgage backed securities and commercial mortgage backed securities in Credit Suisse's trading book in late 2007 and early 2008. [8]
On November 22, 2013, Judge Alvin Hellerstein sentenced Serageldin to 30 months in prison. [9] [3] Serageldin also agreed to return $25.6 million in compensation to Credit Suisse. [3]
On January 21, 2014, Serageldin was ordered to pay more than $1 million to settle the lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He was also effectively barred from the securities industry. [3] [10]
Serageldin said he committed the crime "To preserve my reputation in the bank at a time when there was great financial turmoil". [8]
He served at the Moshannon Valley Correctional Center [1] and was released in March 2016. [11]