FRAUD. ?A high street bank manager swindled £21 million from his employer after having been named business manager of the year three in a row. Donald MacKenzie, 45, was praised as a model employee by the Royal Bank of Scotland but used his position to create hundreds of false accounts to pay personal bills and settle the account of a rugby club where he was treasurer. MacKenzie had set up more than 1 200 suspected false accounts and was said by police to be operating a ?bank within a bank?.

He lent up to £1 million at a time to clients without the proper paperwork and then created a maze of false accounts and loans to cover his tracks. The full extent of Mackenzie?s deception was revealed on Tuesday last when he admitted obtaining loans totalling nearly £21.4 million by fraud. He also admitted stealing £37,170 while employed as a business manager at the bank?s West End branch in Princess Street.

Mackenzie faces a jail sentence of up to six years, and on Tuesday last a judge at the High Court of Edinburgh rejected a defence plea that he be allowed to remain on bail.

MacKenzie, whose wife also works at the Royal Bank of Scotland, was arrested in April 2004 aftet his line manager questioned a single transaction of £300 000 and found that it was being paid into a false account. On further examination the bank discovered tens of thousands of suspicious transactions form early 1999 to April 2004.

MacKenzie was found to have £17 320 on him in cash and a separate search of his house by police uncovered a further £7 900 in his garage??

Extract from ?The Times?

REUTERS. Reuters Group Plc a annoncé dimanche avoir acquis pour 41 millions de dollars en espèces le fournisseur de logiciels de gestion des risques Application Networks afin d?élargir la gamme des services qu?il propose à ses clients.

Application Networks, qui dispose de bureaux à Londres et à Palo Alto, en Californie, vend le logiciel JRisk, fournissant aux banques et aux ?hedge funds? une plate-forme d?échanges d?actions et de produits dérivés de taux d?intérêt et de changes dans le cadre de leurs activités de gestion des risques. Ses clients comptent notamment J.P.Morgan Chase et Société générale.

Reuters est l?un des principaux prestataires mondiaux de nouvelles, d?informations financières et de solutions technologiques. ?Reuters Trade and Risk Management?, qui fournit aux institutions financières des produits couvrant la gestion des flux d?ordres, la prise de décision sur les transactions et le contrôle des risques, a généré l?an dernier 82 millions de livres sterling (151,2 millions de dollars) de revenus.