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PARIS -- It took Jerome Kerviel, the celebrity rogue trader who stands accused of losing billions of euros at the French bank Societe Generale, 10 minutes to make it through the scrum of microphones and journalists outside a courtroom Tuesday. The media onslaught on the first day of the opening hearing of his long-awaited trial -- a three-week marathon of cross-examinations and expert hearings -- set the stage for a national event with running commentary on topics as diverse as the body language of the lawyers (celebrities in their own right) to the color of the stripes in Mr. Kerviel's tie (pink). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

PARIS -- When risky bets by the rogue trader Jerome Kerviel had the French bank Societe Generale teetering near collapse in January 2008, Lehman Brothers was still going strong, Bernard L. Madoff was a sought-after money manager, and subprime mortgages had just caught the attention of regulators. Since then, the biggest trading fraud in history has been dwarfed by other financial crises. But Mr. Kerviel's rogue bets, which cost Societe Generale almost 5 billion euros, were in some ways a harbinger of what was to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new lawyers for Jerome Kerviel, the former trader whose hidden bets cost the French bank Societe Generale nearly 5 billion euros or $7.2 billion, told a judge on Wednesday that he was not the only one engaged in such unauthorized trading. Caroline Wassermann, one of six lawyers in a reshuffled defense team, said after a hearing that she and her colleagues had the names of traders at the bank who conducted ''similar practices,'' though not on the same scale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]