Jerome Kerviel Anti-Anglo French Hero
JEROME Kerviel has committed the biggest individual fraud in history. In France, he’s a hero:
France behind the biggest ‘rogue trader’ scandal of all time. Some 300 miles west of Paris, in his home village of Pont l’Abbé on the Brittany peninsula, Kerviel is a hero - particularly with the ladies in the hair salon his mother used to own.
‘He was your ideal son-in-law,’ said 62-year-old Martine Le Pohon, who remembers Jérôme helping his mother out on Saturdays at Un Monde Imagin’ Hair. ‘And if it turns out that he has stood up to the system to the tune of €5m, well, as far as I am concerned, that makes him even more ideal.’
Maryvonne Even, 40, said Kerviel was a scapegoat. ‘He was probably caught fiddling - a bit - and the bosses decided to blame him for all their losses,’ she said.
But this is not just local Breton solidarity. In France, where there is profound popular distrust for big finance, strong opposition to ‘international capitalism’ and a belief in the ‘French model’ as opposed to ’savage Anglo-Saxon liberalism’, the views of the ladies in Pont l’Abbé are widespread.
It’s all our fault…
January 27th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I had to smile, thinking of Kerviel’s Breton suppoorters. I must admit there is some truth in it.
Don’t forget that fifty years ago 25% of the voters voted communist in France. If you want to show you aren’t a wicked rich here, you still have to prove that you don’t mind thinking like the working class, with a few anti-capitalist sentences, before you can say what you really think.
Let me defend my country, though. When I hear some British saying Good Old England is no longer the same because of EEC, I know it is no use telling them that even without Europe, England would have changed, I think of our own simplistic, chauvisnistic lines, and I smile, also thinking of all the people I meet on the Eurostar : the British who love living in anti Anglo-Saxon communist France, and the French who love living in Savage-capitalist Britain.
January 27th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
this “article” is quite stupid …..
Yann
Brittany
January 28th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Such a proud mother-in-law!
January 28th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
I do not know who wrote this article, but why does the writer talk about Savage Capitalist Britain ?
Mr Kerviel is Breton, and if u knew a bit more your neighbours, there are huge differences in attitudes to capitalism as u name it, in Brittany compared to what other frenchies think.
He is just the son of a hairdresser, who has been polite to other inhabitants of his original village since he was born, helping at his mother’s shop and taking care of his dying father.
Why should Breton people criticize him? and why should have him thought when while he was gambling on stock markets, about Britain, one amongst the other 27 EU member states, and not more, a fake “country from which our cousins of Wales and Scotland dream to leave?
He grew up in Brittany, now a french land , where people are the most educated in France, a land where even sons of Hairdressers are intelligent enough to earn 100000€ net per year.
Bretons will forgive him whatever he made, even if he is found guilty, that s not communism as u name it , this is only respect, solidarity and forgiveness for one of us who may have made mistakes or may have not.
Erwan
from Brittany
January 29th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
hello, i ‘m an inhabitant from Pont -l’Abbé and i’m confirm this good article . Everyone are interdependant but just in my little town .
Bye . Loys , Pont-l’Abbé.