Kerviel should serve five-year jail term: prosecutor

PARIS (Reuters) - Former Societe Generale trader Jerome Kerviel should serve five years in prison for his role in France's biggest-ever rogue trading scandal, a state prosecutor told a Paris court on Wednesday.

Kerviel is appealing a three-year jail sentence handed down in 2010, as well as an order to repay SocGen 4.9 billion euros ($6.1 billion) lost by the French bank when it closed the trader's massive risky bets in 2008.

In the original case, prosecutors had called for Kerviel to spend at least four years behind bars. The final verdict delivered by the presiding judge demanded three.

"Your decision will have to set an example and be dissuasive, whether all those who see Jerome Kerviel as a victim of finance like it or not...he is a victim only of himself," prosecutor Dominique Gaillardot said in the summing up on Wednesday.

The Kerviel appeal, which is due to end on Thursday, has produced plenty of verbal sparring but little change to the ex-trader's argument that his actions were encouraged by and known to his superiors - if not explicitly, then implicitly.

SocGen has also stuck to its line, saying that Kerviel was a lone wolf who knew he was acting alone. An official from its risk department has told the court that the 35-year-old trader acted with "great ingenuity".

Paris-based lawyer Mabrouk Sassi said the harsher recommendation from the prosecutor may have reflected frustration with Kerviel's unchanged defence strategy.

"If you constantly promise to reveal proof that there has been manipulation, or a plot, and in the end you show nothing, that can be irritating," said Paris-based lawyer Mabrouk Sassi, an expert in white-collar crime. "(Kerviel) did not try to appeal to the court's generosity."

(Reporting by Thierry Leveque; Writing by Lionel Laurent; Editing by James Regan and Christian Plumb)