Société Générale has posted a massive fourth-quarter loss after maverick trader Jérôme Kerviel blew $7.2 billion in unauthorized trades but the bank seems to doing its best not to shoulder any of the blame. Its chairman Daniel Bouton has even defended its strategy. "I am completely determined to continue with our strategy because, even taking into account our very bad year in 2007 due to the financial crisis and this fraud, it's this strategy which creates and will create the most value for shareholders," he told Reuters.

The inability to take any of the blame is even more striking when you look at a preliminary report the bank released this week.

"The General Inspection department believes that, on the whole, the controls provided by the support and control functions were carried out in accordance with the procedures, but did not make it possible to identify the fraud before January 18th 2008. The failure to identify the fraud before that date can be attributed firstly the efficiency and variety of the concealment techniques employed by the fraudster, secondly to the fact that operating staff did not systematically carry out more detailed checks, and finally to the absence of certain controls which were not provided for and which might have identified the fraud. The Inspection General department has refrained from drawing any conclusions at this stage regarding the responsibility of the front office managers supervising the fraud's author, given the ongoing legal investigation which has not enabled it to interview all those concerned."

So in other words, some of it was because of Kerviel's dastardly work and some of it was because the systems weren't up to scratch. But no-one is to blame for that. It makes you wonder, given that it was such an enormous amount of money.

And Société Générale continues to insist that Kerviel must have acted on his own. "At this stage of the investigations, there is no evidence of embezzlement or internal or external complicity (i.e. the existence of a third party who knowingly assisted the fraudster to conceal his positions)."

Again, how could one person be responsible for doing it all on their own when so much money was involved? As analysts have noted, Kerviel would have had to be an Einstein to have done this on his own, something I have blogged about here.