£1.4bn fraud trader Kweku Adoboli bailed pending deportation decision

Former City trader Kweku Adoboli, who gambled away £1.4 billion in the UK’s biggest banking fraud, has been bailed from detention pending a decision over his deportation.

The 38-year-old, who has been held at an immigration centre near Heathrow Airport for 36 days, will travel to Livingston, West Lothian, to live with a friend following a legal hearing on Tuesday.

Despite living in the UK since he was 12, the former public schoolboy and Nottingham University alumnus faces deportation to Ghana, where he has not lived since age four.

He was granted a last-minute injunction blocking his deportation on September 18 and now awaits the outcome of a judicial review on the matter scheduled for October 23.

A group of school and university friends appeared before a judge at Hatton Cross tribunal centre to provide a surety of £120,000.

As a foreign national sentenced to a jail sentence of more than four years, Adoboli is subject to automatic deportation under UK immigration laws.

Granting the decision, immigration judge Stephen Pedro said: “I can’t see there’s anything to indicate there’s substantial grounds for risk of reoffending or absconding.

“From what I can see he has been on immigration bail for three years or so without fault. You should be released later today.”

Home Office official Matthew Williams appeared at the hearing to oppose bail.

The rogue former trader, who was jailed for seven years in 2012, brought Swiss bank UBS to its knees by exceeding his trading limits and failing to mitigate the risk of reckless deals.

He was released in 2015 and has lived in with a long-time university friend in Scotland since then, looking after two godchildren.

Speaking after the hearing, his partner Alice Gray said: “I’m delighted, ecstatic. I didn’t expect this at all. I’m going to go and collect him now.”

More than 130 MPs and MSPs have signed an open letter to Home Secretary Sajid Javid asking him to intervene and block the deportation.

Nearly 75,000 people have signed a petition calling for the deportation to be halted.

Adoboli admitted the enormous losses but claimed that he was pressured by staff to take risks, culminating in a catastrophe that wiped £2.8 billion off the bank’s share value.

He was found guilty at London’s Southwark Crown Court of two counts of fraud by abuse of position in 2012 and freed from jail in 2015.

Since his release he has spoken to students and business and military leaders about toxic risk-taking aspects of City culture and how it can lead traders to commit financial crimes.