SocGen says rogue trader Kerviel may have had help

By Sudip Kar-Gupta

PARIS (Reuters) - Societe Generale (SOGN.PA) trader Jerome Kerviel may have had internal help when he built up massive stock market bets that led to the world's worst trading scandal, a report published by the French bank said on Friday.

The report also blamed weak supervision and poor control systems for the rogue trading scandal which shook the world's banking establishment earlier this year.

The internal report said Kerviel, the junior trader blamed by France's second-biggest bank for $7.7 billion in trading losses, may have been helped by an assistant but added there was no conclusive proof of this.

"We have discovered indications of internal collusion involving a trading assistant, a middle office operational agent," said the report.

"Due to the current on-going criminal investigation, we have been unable to question this employee on this subject. The possibility of such internal collusion must therefore be confirmed by the courts," it added.

The bank has consistently said Kerviel acted alone.

The internal report, the second published by SocGen into the debacle, said the unidentified assistant had manually entered a large number of fraudulent transactions done by Kerviel.

It said the assistant registered "several abnormally high intra-monthly provision flows, without having obtained any valid explanations as to their validity."