"Lee, really. Get your espionage efforts back on track – it is no fun to tell you after the event!"
Another story I missed this week was written up as only The Sun, the UK’s leading tabloid could. It concerned the sorry tale of Simon Sywak, who used to trade FX at Tudor before moving to JPMorgan. When he was at Tudor, I’m told he pushed his banks very hard and that he enjoyed some quite lavish entertaining.
After divorcing his wife, Sywak applied to the UK courts to cut his £2,750-a-month family maintenance payments, claiming he had lost his job and that he was going to retrain as a bus driver. However, his ex-wife hired a private detective, who traced him to Singapore, where he was working as a prop trader for JPMorgan. A UK judge branded Sywak a liar and ordered him to pay £30,000 in back payments, as well as increasing his alimony.
The story swiftly went around the London FX market yesterday, with the added embellishment that JPM had taken umbrage and fired Sywak. It would have been ironic if only it had been true – “what goes around, comes around,” was the comment from one of my hedge fund sales muckers – but I’m told Sywak actually left the bank a few weeks ago and is now employed by Westpac in Sydney.