Kweku Adoboli

Kweku Adoboli, a former UBS trader jailed for Britain’s biggest fraud over unauthorized trades that cost the Swiss bank $2.3 billion, has been deported to Ghana, his spokesman said.

Adoboli was put on a commercial flight from Heathrow on Wednesday after being detained in Scotland earlier in the week, the spokesman said.

Adoboli’s case made global headlines when he was arrested in 2011 and tried in 2012 over the huge losses to UBS, caused by trades far in excess of his authorized risk limits which he had pretended to hedge by booking fictitious off-setting trades.

A Ghanaian national who has lived in Britain since he was 12, Adoboli, now 38, was released from prison on probation in 2015 after serving half of a seven-year sentence.

A spokesman for the interior ministry declined to comment directly on Adoboli’s case, but said: “All foreign nationals who are given a custodial sentence will be considered for deportation.”

Adoboli has been living in Scotland with his two godsons and their parents, and had garnered support from locals and lawmakers for his bid to stay.

Born in Ghana in 1980, Adoboli moved to Jerusalem with his family in 1984 when his father, a United Nations official, was posted there. The family later moved to Syria, and Adoboli never lived in Ghana again apart from during a short stint when the family had to leave Damascus because of the first Gulf War.

In 1992, aged 12, he was sent to a Quaker boarding school in Yorkshire, northern England. He has lived in Britain ever since.

Reuters