Société Générale and Daniel Bouton, its chairman and chief executive, are no strangers to the French police and allegations of financial skullduggery at the very highest level.

The French courts decided 18 months ago that Mr Bouton should be prosecuted along with 137 others in connection with a Franco-Israeli cheque fraud. It is the first time since 1996, when money-laundering became a criminal offence in France, that the chairman of a large French bank has faced criminal charges.

As Mr Bouton prepares to face trial later this year, he faces the challenge of dealing with the €4.9 billion (£3.7 million) rogue trading fraud committed at his own bank, supposedly by only one relatively junior trader, Jérôme Kerviel.

However, Mr Bouton has shown that he is ready to take up the challenge. Before informing the French stock market of Mr Kerviel’s rogue trading, he ensured an emergency €5.5 billion fully underwritten rights issue was in place. This ensured that when Mr Bouton made his brusque statement yesterday informing the markets of SocGen’s losses, the world may have been stunned, but his bank’s stock fell only about 4 per cent.

It is such crisis-management skills that have kept Mr Bouton in the top job at SocGen for 12 years. Often compared to a bulldozer because of his robust physique, he joined the bank in 1991 as executive vice-president after a meteroric rise through the French civil service. A graduate of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration – where contemporaries included a raft of past and present political leaders – Mr Bouton became an inspector of public finances by his mid-twenties. He worked as chief of staff for Alain Juppé during his time as budget minister.

A high-ranking political career of his own would have been the usual path to follow but Mr Bouton opted for the private sector, joining the recently privatised SocGen.

Mr Bouton’s banking career with SocGen nearly came to a premature end in 1999 after an attempt to merge with the rival BNP quickly turned into a bitter fight for survival.

He met Michel Pébereau, his counterpart at BNP, to discuss a merger. However, it soon emerged that SocGen was trying to strike a merger deal with Paribas, another large French bank. BNP responded by making a hostile bid for both Paribas and SocGen. In the end Paribas fell into BNP’s hands but the governor of the Bank of France and the head of the banking regulator stepped in to prevent the offer for SocGen from going ahead. Mr Bouton famously quipped that he “would rather be a gardener” than stay with SocGen if it were taken over by BNP.

Married to Nicole, a board director of Pernod Ricard, Mr Bouton is an opera buff and cigar puffer with a golf handicap of five.

The shareholders
Employees, via ownership plan: 7 per cent
Groupama: 3 per cent
Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Cy: 2 per cent
CDC (Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations): 2 per cent
Fondazione CRT: 1 per cent
Dexia: 1 per cent
CNP: 1 per cent
Aviva: 1 per cent*
Free float: 77 per cent
Buybacks: 3 per cent
Treasury stock: 2 per cent

Percentages rounded to nearest whole number
*Estimated but not confirmed/disclosed

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