U.S. investment bank Citigroup has suspended one of its highest-profile credit traders in Europe after he was accused of stealing food from the company cafeteria, Financial Times reported.
Paras Shah, who is now famous, earned more than $1 million a year as a senior bond trader in London, sources told Financial Times. He allegedly routinely neglected to pay for food, helping himself to sandwiches that were not free at the bank’s London headquarters in Canary Wharf.
Shah, 31, left his job in January as Citi’s head of high-yield bond trading for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
He “may be learning the hard way that there is no free lunch,” Gwen Everett wrote for Business Insider.
Shah is not the first high-ranking Citi leader who is living proof that someone is always watching.
In 2014, BlackRock director Jonathan Paul Burrows was banned from working in financial services after he was caught in regular acts of fare evasion for his train ticket on his commute to London, BBC reported.
Shah joined Citigroup in 2017 after working for seven years at HSBC. He left Citigroup weeks before the bank was due to pay annual bonuses to senior employees.
His job involved trading in junk bonds, which are issued by companies with low credit ratings or short track records as a way to raise cash. The companies have to offer a higher return on investment because there is a risk that the issuer of the bonds will default and render them worthless. This is why they are also known as high-yield bonds, according to BBC.
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Shah was a well-liked and successful trader, two former colleagues told the Financial Times.
Social media had some fun with it. “Was he yield-starved?” a Twitter user asked.
“Bankers have a bad enough reputation at the best of times without doing things that play into any public perceptions of the standards of honesty in the industry,” Daniel Davies wrote for eFinancialCareers. “So offences which don’t really have anything to do with compliance or professional standards in the job get treated in a really draconian fashion.”
