The saga of the infamous rogue trader Nick Leeson never ceases to fascinate. Twelve years ago, Leeson's trades bankrupted Barings, the bank which had put up the money for the Louisiana Purchase and the Napoleonic Wars. Leeson, who failed his final maths exam and left school with a mere handful of qualifications, was regarded as a star at Barings but his bad bets and illegal trades sent the bank down the toilet. He fled to Singapore, was captured and spent three and a half years in jail for fraud.

Making his living these days on the speaker's circuit, playing online poker and working with Irish soccer club Galway United, Leeson has told Bloomberg that he wants to return to full-time trading, this time using his own money.

Leeson still likes a flutter, telling the news agency that he has been betting, of all things, against the dollar. "Rather than going looking for a new job, I might decide I'd rather watch screens for 24 hours,'' Leeson told Bloomberg, "I can't leave it alone entirely.''

All this from someone who, a few months ago, was telling the world that it wasn't his fault Barings collapsed. The reason it had happened, he said, was because he hadn't been supervised. At the time, I explored that argument in this blog entry.

Still, the question is whether anyone would now trust him with their money.

What all that says is that Leeson still remains a committed gambler. And working as a derivatives trader would be right up his sleeve because essentially what you are doing is placing bets on people placing bets. In that line of work, there needs to be controls and yes, that was something Barings neglected to do. Indeed,the combination of Leeson's ego and lack of control, and the bank's own greed and stupidity was a lethal mix.

Leeson returning to trading would be like Donald Rumsfeld considering another crack at Iraq or Jeff Skilling planning a return to management, says David Weidner at MarketWatch.

But as Weidner says, the financial world can't exactly claim the moral high ground here.

Weidner writes: "The road to redemption has been paved of late by ex-former analyst Henry Blodget, ex-former investment banker Frank Quattrone and I-promise-this-hedge-fund-won't-require-a-multi-billion-dollar-bailout John Meriwether ... Surely Leeson could thrive in an environment where compliance officers at major Wall Street firms are indicted in insider trading schemes. Last week's insider case netted 14 people alleged to have swindled $15 million by trading on bank info gleaned in part by Randi Collatta, an compliance attorney at Morgan Stanley. And should he think it's just an isolated incident, Leeson should know that the Securities and Exchange Commission prosecuted 46 insider trading cases last fiscal year. In fact, there were 574 enforcement actions including 61 for securities offering violations, 75 broker-dealer violations and 27 for market manipulation schemes."

So Leeson will be in good company. Just make sure someone keeps an eye on him this time. And please, this time make sure he's playing with his own money.