When the Walter Mitty of the trading world walks free from a Singapore jail today he will cut a sympathetic figure for many.
Nick Leeson, the futures trader who sank the bank that financed the Louisiana Purchase, became a criminal by virtue of a fantastical belief in his own legend combined with his employers' incompetence and greed. Because he lacked the self-serving motivation of the common or garden criminal some would go as far as to suggest that he did nothing wrong.
Try telling that to the thousands of Barings bond-holders, many of them elderly, who lost their life's savings in February 1995 when the world's oldest merchant bank collapsed due to the prolonged dodgy dealings of a rogue trader.
For two years Leeson, a supposed whizkid with Barings, had buried spectacular losses made on the trading floor of the Singapore International Money Exchange (SIMEX), bizarrely imagining that he could eventually work it all out.
Spurred on by his employers' unswerving belief in their star trader - on paper he was responsible for 20 per cent of Barings group profits in 1993 - Leeson dug the company further into a financial black hole until the bank fell in. He has paid for his "crimes" with four years in jail. Doctors say the colon cancer he developed in prison leaves him with a 30 per cent chance of dying in the next five years.
But today he is to be free - good news not just for him but for the makers of a new film of his life which was released this week. Rogue Trader documents the roller-coaster story of Leeson from the day he was posted to the Far East by his Barings bosses. It starts there because up to then the life of Nick Leeson had been largely unremarkable.
Born into a solidly working-class family in the north London suburb of Watford in 1967, he was said by neighbours to be a "quiet, bright boy" who played football and wanted to make something of himself. His father was a plasterer, his mother died when he was a teenager, an event which his teachers said he handled bravely.
In fact, the most remarkable event of his early life is his mark for his A-level maths exam. He got an F, which was to prove no hindrance later when it came to cooking the Barings books.
Leeson started as a clerk at the queen's bankers, Coutts. He progressed from there to Morgan Stanley and then on to Barings. He was itching to get out of the back office - where each day's trading is checked and sorted - and on to the trading floor.
A posting in Jakarta presented him with exactly that chance. He impressed his bosses, through his supreme confidence and knowledge of the then obscure trading methods in the futures markets, and rose quickly to become general manager of Barings' operation in SIMEX. He was also responsible for back-room dealings, an unusual decision which Barings would come to regret.
Resplendent in yellow and green blazer the chubby, balding and baby-faced 28-year-old ruled the floor, shifting millions with gestures, making a six-figure bonus and at his peak earning around £400,000 a year. He was known as "king of the exchange" by fellow traders who were amazed at his gift for the split second guesswork needed in the futures and derivatives game.
By this time he had married Lisa Sims, and the pair lived in unsophisticated luxury, partying in the city's hotspots while reportedly flying sausages in from Britain and watching reruns of Dad's Army on video in a $4,000-a-month apartment.
To Lisa, her husband was living the dream that was going to secure their future together. For Nick it had already turned into a nightmare when, instead of sacking an inexperienced employee who had made a £20,000 mistake on the floor, he hid his losses using the now legendary Error Account 88888.
It was at this point he realised any errors he made could be covered up in this way. Against all the regulations, Leeson began to use the bank's own money to play the market, inventing a mystery customer as a foil.
When he lost he disguised the losses with the five-eights account, securing millions from the London office each day to fund what they believed were his record-breaking deals.
Leeson was out of control, and his employers were too keen on the profits he seemed to generate to look too closely at the books. The fact that few of them understood the dealing area Leeson was engaged in was an additional incentive to leave him alone.
As the losses built, the stress took its toll on Leeson, who appears to have believed that his talent could influence the markets so his losses would be reversed. With the earthquake in Japan in February 1995 a market collapse and discovery became unavoidably imminent. He confessed everything to his wife and they took the first flight to a luxury holiday resort in Borneo.
They discovered the full extent of Leeson's market shenanigans courtesy of a newspaper headline. Barings Bank had gone bust with £860 million worth of debts. It was later sold for £1 to a Dutch bank.
Leeson was arrested on flying from Borneo to Frankfurt and sent to trial in Singapore after an extradition request was refused. He was sentenced to 61/2 years but has served just four of them in the prison where he sewed uniforms for £1 a week.
"I thought everything was perfect, but from the moment we married he was leading a double life," his wife said afterwards.
She stuck by him until the publication of his autobiography in 1996, which revealed the full extent of his deception and listed details of their sex life and his dalliances with geisha girls. He had been fined for dropping his trousers on one of his drinking binges in Singapore's upmarket wine bars. She is now married to a back-office clerk in London.
His sense of humour never left him and in a letter to a friend from prison he compared the run of bad luck for his beloved Manchester City FC to his own experience with Barings. "It reminds me of my own plight in that I used to wake up every morning thinking that it had to get better . . . It didn't and then I ended up in here," he wrote.
"There's things that he did that were wrong, but if you went into the back rooms of a bank there would be that type of thing going on," said Ewan McGregor, the actor who plays him in Rogue Trader. Leeson, who can now look forward to earning an estimated £100,000 from selling his story and healthy profits from the film, was no different from them, he maintains, except that "Nick got nicked".
The lasting impression on watching Rogue Trader is one of sheer awe that one person can lie so well, for so long while under such excruciating, or as Leeson himself might put it "ball-breaking", pressure. In the light of this grand deceit one wonders what to make of his subsequent claims that he never profited from his illicit trading. How does anybody know that even after four years in a Singapore jail Nick Leeson is not a very wealthy man?
James Deardon, director of Rogue Trader, told an interviewer last September that he would stake a lot of money that Leeson "had not got any money stashed away". "If he does he is a brilliant actor," he added. But surely Leeson has revealed his considerable skills in that department already?