The disgraced former UBS trader Kweku Adoboli has had an application to overturn a deportation order against him rejected in the court of appeal.
Thursday’s ruling is the latest development in the convicted fraudster’s four-year battle to overturn the order to deport him from the UK to Ghana, the country of his birth, which was issued by the Home Office on 8 July 2014 on the grounds that he is a foreign criminal.
Adoboli’s unauthorised trading lost the Swiss bank £1.4bn. It has been described as the largest trading loss in British banking history.
The 38-year-old says he considers himself to be British, having spent a large part of his life in the UK, attending Ackworth school in Yorkshire, where he was head boy, and Nottingham University before working for UBS.
In 2012 he was sentenced to seven years in jail on two counts of fraud. The deportation order was served on him after he had served three and a half years of his sentence.
The court of appeal judge Lord Justice Lewison refused permission for an appeal against a decision by the immigration court that upheld the Home Office deportation order against Adoboli.
The decision by the upper tribunal of the immigration and asylum chamber said that although Adoboli was socially and culturally integrated into the UK, his family was in Ghana and he had not demonstrated that there would be significant obstacles to him integrating into Ghanaian society.
“The public interest in deporting foreign criminals is a fixed criterion,” Lewison said. He added that the case Adoboli was presenting did not raise any important points of principle or practice and dismissed his application.
Adoboli represented himself and was tearful after the hearing. “I’m British just like anyone else,” he said.
He was released from prison in 2015. Foreign nationals sentenced to more than four years are automatically considered for deportation.
Adoboli, the son of a UN peacekeeper, left Ghana at the age of four, lived mostly in the Middle East for several years and then settled in the UK at the age of 12.
His last hope of avoiding deportation is a judicial review that he has lodged in the high court arguing that the Home Office has acted unlawfully towards him.
However, Lewison said that the review had been lodged out of time and it was “overwhelmingly likely” that permission would be refused on that ground alone.
Adoboli told the court that the stress he had experienced with the Home Office had delayed him in preparing the case.
During his criminal trial, Adoboli said that UBS staff had been encouraged to take risks. The Financial Conduct Authority banned Adoboli from working in the City for life.
UBS was fined £29.7m for systems and control failures related to the unauthorised trading losses.
In his criminal case, the sentencing judge said Adoboli was profoundly lacking in self-consciousness about his own failings and had a strong gambling streak.
Adoboli told the Guardian that he was now a reformed character, devoting himself to voluntary work including giving talks to young City traders about the dangers of their risk-culture workplace, and talking to students about making the right life choices.
He argued that sufficient weight had not been given to this positive contribution to British society and was hoping that he would be given a second chance now that he had turned his life around.
“My contribution to society now should be balanced against the public interest in deporting me. I have had my banking licence taken away from me so could never commit a crime of this kind again. Part of the human condition is to make mistakes,” he said.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Foreign nationals who abuse our hospitality by committing crimes in the UK should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them. All foreign nationals who are given a custodial sentence will be considered for removal and we have removed more than 42,800 foreign offenders since 2010.”
