Zimbabwe observers point to runoff vote, suspect possible rigging

(CNN)

Zimbabwe's government Monday began releasing the results of the weekend parliamentary vote, but offered no data on the hotly contested presidential race.

President Robert Mugabe is facing the most formidable challenge to his 28-year rule from two opponents, including his former finance minister, Simba Makoni, who is running as an independent.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change, led by presidential contender Morgan Tsvangirai, announced Sunday that it had won enough votes in Saturday's presidential and parliamentary election to end the 84-year-old incumbent's reign.

But a group of non-governmental organizations monitoring the election released exit polling data Monday that indicated the race possibly headed for a runoff vote.

Noel Kututwa, chairman of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, said that his group's polling data gave Tsvangirai 49.4 percent of the vote -- short of the 51 percent needed to win. Mugabe was second with 41.8 percent, and Makoni third with 8.2 percent.

Election authorities have released no data on the presidential race. Government officials said it takes time to verify and "harmonize" the counts.

The United States, which has raised concerns about election fraud in the southern African country, called on Zimbabwe's government to make sure "the counting of the votes ... ensures the will of the people is heard," State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Monday.

While election observers have urged prompt reporting of the results to avoid political unrest, government officials said it would take time to verify and "harmonize" the counts.

It is unlikely that Mugabe will receive any congratulations from the U.S. if he emerges as the victor.

Speaking to reporters during her trip to the Middle East, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the long-time president and his government "a disgrace to the people of Zimbabwe and a disgrace to southern Africa and to the continent of Africa as a whole."

Kututwa said the delay in announcing all the results was "fueling speculation" that Mugabe's government was tampering with the ballot count. His group was monitoring the election.

"This is very worrying," Kututwa said.

Despite the lack of official results, the MDC insisted it had won enough votes to end Mugabe's rule, which has seen the nation slide into economic meltdown.

Defying a government order, the Movement for Democratic Change said it tallied the results posted outside each polling station -- and based on one-third of the returns, that count shows Tsvangirai won 67 percent of the votes, journalists inside Zimbabwe told CNN.

The Zimbabwean government has denied CNN and other international news organizations permission to enter the country to report on the elections.

MDC also claimed it had won the majority of parliamentary seats in Zimbabwe's urban centers, including Harare and Bulawayo. It enjoys widespread support in the cities, while Mugabe's Zanu-PF party has its base in Zimbabwe's rural areas, where white farmers have been driven out.

By Monday evening, just 67 of 210 parliamentary races were released -- ZANU-PF won 31; MDC won 30; and six won by a party that split from the MDC.

Two members of President Robert Mugabe's cabinet -- Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa and Interactive Affairs Minister Chen Chimutengwende -- lost their seats to the MDC. But Mugabe's nephew, Patrick Zhuwao, won a seat in his uncle's home district.

MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa held onto his seat in a district of Harare.

Kututwa said some MDC members had been arrested for celebrating in the streets.

MDC leaders began declaring victory just hours into Saturday's vote. But there are concerns that if each side claims victory, tensions could ignite and violence could erupt -- as happened this year in Kenya.

Observers from the South African Democratic Alliance opposition party also said its sources had said the opposition had won a majority in most areas.

"If this is not reflected in the results, this will be yet another indication that the election was rigged," they added.

Critics of the government had predicted voting would be rigged. The United States warned of a possible unfair election, and New York-based Human Rights Watch said the elections were likely to be "deeply flawed."

Makoni, who was expelled from the Zanu-PF after announcing his own bid to unseat Mugabe, said it was "premature to judge that the environment before the balloting has had some impediment."

Makoni said: "We know our people are clear about what they want... We will wait and see the results."

The announcement of results appeared to have been delayed despite election observers saying some results were known on Saturday night, four hours after polls closed. In previous elections, partial results were announced hours after voting ended.

Criticism of Mugabe has grown across Zimbabwe, with unemployment running at 80 percent. Most Zimbabweans survive on less than $1 a day and inflation is the highest in the world at more than 100,000 percent.

People also suffer from chronic shortages of food, water, electricity, fuel and medicine, and thousands of Zimbabweans flood into neighboring countries looking for jobs.

Part of the economic freefall is traced to Mugabe's land redistribution policies, including his controversial seizure of commercially white-owned farms in 2000.

Mugabe gave the land to black Zimbabweans he said were cheated under colonialist rule, and white farmers who resisted were jailed.

In 2005, Mugabe launched Operation Clean Out the Trash, in which he razed slum areas across the country. Mugabe denies mismanagement and blames his country's woes on the West, saying sanctions have harmed the economy.

Curious details discovered on J.F. Kennedy's assasination

Associated Press

A curious transcript purportedly about President John F. Kennedy's assassination has been discovered among boxes of memorabilia that were long forgotten in an old safe at the Dallas County district attorney's office.

While the transcript reads like a conspiracy theorist's dream — Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby plotting to kill Kennedy — the DA's top assistant said it's likely material for a proposed movie.

Other items found in an old safe on the 10th floor of the county courthouse include letters to and from former DA Henry Wade, the now-dead prosecutor in the Ruby trial, The Dallas Morning News reported in Sunday's editions. Ruby shot and killed Kennedy assassin Oswald two days after the president's death.

There are also letters to Ruby, records from his trial, a gun holster and clothing that probably belonged to Ruby and Oswald, said District Attorney Craig Watkins, who planned to discuss the find at a news conference Monday.

Much of the attention is bound to focus on the transcript purporting that Ruby and Oswald met at Ruby's nightclub on Oct. 4, 1963, less than two months before the Nov. 22 assassination. In it, they talked of killing the president because the Mafia wanted to "get rid of" his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Says Oswald in the transcript, "I can still do it, all I need is my rifle and a tall building; but it will take time, maybe six months to find the right place; but I'll have to have some money to live on while I do the planning."

Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum near where the president was shot, hasn't seen the transcript but doubts it's real. It is well-documented that Oswald was in Irving the evening of Oct. 4, at a home where his wife was staying, Mack said.

"The fact that it's sitting in Henry Wade's file, and he didn't do anything, indicates he thought it wasn't worth anything," Mack said. "He probably kept it because it was funny. It's hilarious. It's like a bad B movie."

Terri Moore, Watkins' top assistant, said she believes the latest transcript is part of a movie Wade was working on with producers. The former prosecutor wrote about the proposed movie, "Countdown in Dallas," in letters found in the safe.

"It's not real. Crooks don't talk like that," Moore said. "If that transcript is true, then history is changed because Oswald and Ruby were talking about assassinating the president."

The transcript resembles one published in a report by the Warren Commission, which investigated Kennedy's assassination and determined that Oswald was the lone gunman. The FBI determined that conversation between Oswald and Ruby about killing the governor was definitely fake.

The account in the commission report was "re-created" for authorities by a now-deceased Dallas attorney who claimed he recognized Oswald in a newspaper photo as the man he saw talking to Ruby.

It's unknown whether the boxes Watkins and others found in the courthouse about a year ago have information previously undisclosed to the public or the Warren Commission.

The search began after Watkins was told the gun used to kill Oswald was somewhere in the courthouse. They didn't find the gun, which Mack said is privately owned. The boxes probably sat in the safe since being moved when the courthouse opened in 1989.

The items are still being processed and eventually will be donated to an entity that can authenticate them, preserve them and make them available to the public, Watkins said.

"It's interesting, and it's not ours," Watkins said. "It's the public's."

Details on NIU gunman emerge

By CARYN ROUSSEAU and DEANNA BELLANDI, Associated Press Writers

The man who gunned down five people at Northern Illinois University in a suicidal rampage became erratic after halting his medication and carried a shotgun to campus inside a guitar case, police said Friday.

The man, 27-year-old former student Stephen Kazmierczak, was also wielding three handguns during Thursday's ambush inside a lecture hall.

Two of the weapons — the pump-action Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun — were purchased legally less than a week ago, on Feb. 9, authorities said. They were purchased in Champaign, where Kazmierczak was enrolled at the University of Illinois.

A spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said the other two guns were also legally purchased and traced to the Champaign gun shop, but the ATF was still determining when Kazmierczak picked them up.

Kazmierczak had a valid Firearm Owner's Identification Card, which is required for all Illinois residents who buy or possess firearms, authorities said.

The gunman's father, Robert Kazmierczak, briefly came out of his single-story house in Lakeland, Fla., to talk to reporters.

"Please leave me alone. I have no statement to make and no comment. OK? I'd appreciate that. This is a very hard time. I'm a diabetic and I don't want to go into a relapse," he said before breaking down crying.

He then went back inside his house, which has a sign on the front door that says "Illini fans live here."

President Bush talked by telephone with NIU President John Peters and said people will be praying for the families of the victims and for the Northern Illinois University community.

Campus Police Chief Donald Grady said investigators recovered 48 shell casings and six shotgun shells following the attack in Cole Hall. The gunman paused to reload his shotgun after opening fire on a crowd of terrified students in a geology class, sending them running and crawling toward the exits. He shot himself to death on the stage of the hall.

Kazmierczak, whose first name was earlier listed as Steven, was taking some kind of medication, Grady said.

"He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks," Grady said, declining to name the drug or provide other details.

Correcting information his office released earlier Friday, DeKalb County Coroner Dennis J. Miller said five students, not six, were killed in the rampage, in addition to the gunman. Miller said the higher victim total was the result of confusion over the fate of a patient taken to another county for treatment.

"There was a miscommunication," Miller said.

The motive of the killer, who graduated from NIU in 2006 but was a student there as recently as last year, was still not known. Grady said Kazmierczak was an "outstanding" student while at NIU and authorities were still trying to determine why he would kill. There was no known suicide note.

"We were dealing with a disturbed individual who intended to do harm on this campus," Peters said.

Witnesses said the gunman, dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap, emerged from behind a screen on the stage of 200-seat Cole Hall and opened fire just as the class was about to end around 3 p.m. Officials said 162 students were registered for the class but it was unknown how many were there Thursday.

John Giovanni, 20, of Des Plaines said the gunman calmly fired at the greatest concentration of students.

"He was shooting from the hip. He was just shooting," said Giovanni, who turned and ran so fast that he lost a shoe. "I was running but I was hurtling over people in the fetal position."

Peters said four people died at the scene, including three students and the gunman. The other died at a hospital. The teacher, a graduate student, was wounded but was expected to recover.

Miller released the identities of four victims: Daniel Parmenter, 20, of Westchester; Catalina Garcia, 20, of Cicero; Ryanne Mace, 19, of Carpentersville; and Julianna Gehant, 32, of Meridan.

Another victim, Gayle Dubowski, a 20-year-old sophomore from Carol Stream, died at a Rockford hospital, Winnebago County Coroner Sue Fiduccia said.

The killer had been a graduate student in sociology at Northern Illinois as recently as spring 2007, Peters said. He also said the suspect had no record of police contact or an arrest record while attending Northern Illinois, a campus with 25,000 students about 65 miles west of Chicago.

The gunman was a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Chancellor Richard Herman said. The university is about 140 miles south of Chicago.

Lauren Carr said she was sitting in the third row when she saw the shooter walk through a door on the right-hand side of the stage, pointing a gun straight ahead.

"I personally Army-crawled halfway up the aisle," said Carr, a 20-year-old sophomore. "I said I could get up and run or I could die here."

She said a student in front of her was bleeding, "but he just kept running."

"I heard this girl scream, 'Run, he's reloading the gun!'"

More than a hundred students cried and hugged as they gathered outside the Phi Kappa Alpha house early Friday to remember Parmenter. Flowers, candles and small notes were left in the snow near Cole Hall. Flags were flying at half-staff. At a house across the street, a hand-drawn banner made out of a sheet said: 'NIU We Pray 4 U'

The campus was closed on Friday. Students were urged to call their parents and were offered counseling at any residence hall, according to the school Web site.

The school was closed for one day during final exam week in December after campus police found threats, including racial slurs and references to shootings earlier in the year at Virginia Tech, scrawled on a bathroom wall in a dormitory. Police determined after an investigation that there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened. Peters said he knew of no connection between that incident and Thursday's attack.

Kenya violence grows after opposition leader slain

By TOM MALITI, Associated Press Writer

Gunmen killed an opposition lawmaker in Nairobi and government helicopters fired on crowds in the Rift Valley on Tuesday, the latest flare-up of the ethnic fighting that has gripped Kenya since its disputed presidential election.

Under increasing pressure to share power, President Mwai Kibaki and the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, formally opened negotiations but the two remained far apart on the vote outcome — an issue each indicates is not negotiable.

Odinga insisted what needed "the most urgent attention" was the resolution of the flawed election results. Kibaki deplored the fact that some Kenyans "have been incited to hate one another and view each other as enemies."

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is helping mediate the dispute and Tuesday's meeting.

"The people need you," he told them. "They want you to take charge of the situation and do whatever possible to prevent the downward slide into chaos that is threatening this country."

Mugabe Were, who was shot to death as he drove home, was among a slew of opposition members who won seats in the legislative vote held at the same time as the presidential election. The opposition, which won the most seats in parliament, accuses Kibaki of stealing the presidential vote.

After Were's death, groups of armed youths began gathering in two Nairobi slums. Sabat Abdullah, a slum resident, said a gang hefting machetes dragged a doctor from the president's Kikuyu tribe from his clinic "and then cut and cut until his head was off."

Similar scenes have convulsed western Kenya, where police in helicopters fired on crowds on Tuesday. Since the Dec. 27 election, the death toll across a country once among the most stable in Africa has soared to over 800. Much of the violence has pitted other tribes against Kikuyu, long resented for their dominance of Kenyan politics and business.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential hopeful whose father was Kenyan, appealed for peace on Nairobi's Capital FM radio station.

"Now is the time for all parties to renounce violence. Now is the time for Kenyan leaders to rise above party affiliations and past ambitions for the sake of peace," Obama said. "Most troubling are new indications that the violence is being organized, planned and coordinated."

In Washington, the State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the ongoing violence underscored the importance of negotiations.

"This is a political dispute and it requires a political solution. The two leaders have to come to some agreement on how that is done," Casey said.

Police said Were's death was being treated "as a murder but we are not ruling out anything, including political motives."

"We suspect the foul hands of our adversaries," Odinga said as he made his way Tuesday to Were's home, where dozens of protesters manned burning barricades of tires and uprooted telephone posts.

Kibaki condemned the killing, appealed for calm and promised police would act swiftly to ensure the perpetrators were dealt with severely.

In the Mathare slum, armed Luo men at a roadblock dragged a Kikuyu man from his car and attacked him with machetes, volunteer aid worker Fospeter Ouma said. "They slashed him so much. I think he must have died," he said.

Angry supporters of Were in the slum area of Dandora, the murdered politician's constituency, set fire to homes and shops owned by Kikuyus and brandished axes and machetes.

Police fired tear gas, and later live bullets, to disperse them, and beat them with clubs. An AP Television cameraman saw a policeman pursue protesters down a mud road, shooting at them with a pistol.

In Western Kenya's Rift Valley, about 5,000 people set fire to homes and smashed shop windows in Naivasha, dragging away goods. Five police officers fired into the air but were unable to control the turmoil. Naivasha's police chief tried to calm the crowd but was pelted with stones and fled in his car.

A police helicopter and two military helicopters then flew over the crowd and officers began shooting, sending people running in panic. A reporter saw two bodies with bullet wounds, but it was unclear whether they were shot by officers in the air or on the ground.

Reporters also watched the helicopters swoop down, with officers firing on a mob of armed Kikuyus pinning down hundreds of Luos outside the Naivasha Country Club. Kikuyus, armed with machetes and clubs inset with nails, had prevented the Luos from escaping for two days.

On Tuesday, police began evacuating them, and police chief Grace Kakai said the helicopters helped.

"There were very big crowds gathering and we had to disperse them so we used helicopter patrols. They were not firing at the crowd. We were trying to scare them, not hurt them," she said. Some 300 Luos were evacuated, she said.

The Rift Valley has seen some of the worst of the postelection violence. At least 90 people were killed there over the weekend.

Kibaki and Odinga blame each other for the violence, which has driven 255,000 people from their homes. The two men have traded accusations of "ethnic cleansing." Human rights groups and officials charge the violence has become organized.

Prosecutor seeks appropriate charges against trader

By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press Writer

A Paris prosecutor on Monday asked for preliminary charges of forgery, breach of trust and fraud against a low-level trader accused by Societe Generale bank of orchestrating the largest securities fraud ever by single person.

Prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin said Jerome Kerviel, 31, did not attempt to steal money from the bank or its customers, but was motivated by a desire to be "an exceptional trader" and that he sought performance bonuses.

Kerviel appears to have acted alone, Marin said.

"It's always a bit for money, I'm not sure that was his prime motive," said the prosecutor. "It functions a bit like a drug, it's an addiction ... there's a sort of spiral you can't get out of."

Kerviel told investigators, who just wrapped up 48 hours of questioning, that he expected a bonus of 300,000 euros ($441,150) for 2007.

Societe Generale said it lost 4.82 billion euros ($7.09 billion) after unwinding Kerviel's trades.

Kerviel was set to appear before a judge who will decide whether to proceed with preliminary charges.

Under French law, filing preliminary charges means the judge has determined there is strong evidence to suggest involvement in a crime and gives investigators time to ask for a trial.

The bank's offices were searched Friday and "masses of documents" including computer records were seized, Marin said.

CEO Daniel Bouton said Societe Generale, thought by some experts to be vulnerable to a takeover, has not been approached.

Bank shares fell nearly 4 percent to 70.94 euros ($104.32) Monday.

Meanwhile, questions about how the bank handled the fraud are mounting. A lawyer for a group of Societe Generale shareholders, Frederik Canoy, said a legal complaint had been filed Monday asking investigators to look into possible insider trading.

The complaint was filed after France's market watchdog said in a routine disclosure that a member of Societe Generale's board, Robert A. Day, sold 85.75 million euros ($126.1 million) worth of shares in the bank on Jan. 9 — two weeks before the fraud announcement and well before bank management says it knew about the problem. Day is an investment manager with U.S.-based Trust Company of the West, or TCW, who Forbes magazine says has a net worth is $1.6 billion.

Two foundations linked to Day, the Robert A. Day Foundation and the Kelly Day Foundation, also sold a total of 9.59 million euros ($14.1 million) worth of shares a day later, on Jan. 10, the market watchdog reported. Regulators have made no allegations of wrongdoing.

Telephone calls to both Day foundations and TCW were not immediately returned Monday.

Bouton rejected suggestions from Kerviel's lawyers that Societe Generale was using their client to hide big losses linked to the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis.

"How could you want to imagine that we would have been able to hide a hole by another hole? It's completely stupid," Bouton told Europe-1 radio. He called Kerviel a "remarkable concealer" who had managed to outwit the bank's risk control systems by toggling between real and fictitious positions.

"That's what created this gigantic fraud," he said.

Elisabeth Meyer, one of Kerviel's defense lawyers, said he was "bearing up to the shock."

She disputed Societe Generale claims that Kerviel had committed fraud, saying he was in the black with his trades as of Dec. 31.

"In my view, he was thrown to the lions before being able to explain himself," said Meyer. "It's a lynching."

Another lawyer, Christian Charriere-Bournazel, said on Europe-1 radio that Kerviel made a profit of 1.5 billion euros ($2.2 billion) before his bets went sour.

The prosecutor, however, said the trader only "virtually" made a profit for the bank.

Kerviel could face a maximum seven years imprisonment if convicted under the current charges, the prosecutor said.

A day after the bank sent out a five-page explanation of how the fraud unfolded, analysts still had many questions.

Societe Generale alleges that Kerviel used other people's computer access codes, falsified documents and used other methods to cover his tracks — helped by his previous experience in other offices at the bank that monitor traders. It says he bet some 50 billion euros ($73.53 billion) — more that the bank's market worth — on European markets.

Societe Generale Bank Uncovers $7 billion Fraud by Futures Trader

By Emma Vandore, Associated Press Writer

French bank Societe Generale said Thursday it has uncovered a 4.9 billion euro ($7.14 billion) fraud -- one of history's biggest -- by a single futures trader whose scheme of fictitious transactions was discovered as stock markets began to stumble in recent days.

CEO Daniel Bouton said the trader's motivations were "irrational," netting the trader no personal financial gains. Still, the bank is seeking to have him prosecuted in court.

A person familiar with the case named the trader as Jerome Kerviel. Bank officials said the trader was a Frenchman in his 30s who probably acted alone. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

The bombshell destabilized a major bank already exposed to the subprime crisis. France's second-largest bank by market value said it would be forced to seek euro5.5 billion (US$8.02 billion) in new capital.

Societe Generale filed a complaint Thursday with a court in Nanterre, west of Paris, accusing the trader of fraudulent falsification of banking records, use of such records and computer fraud, the bank said in a statement.

The Paris prosecutor opened a preliminary investigation Thursday based on a complaint filed by a small shareholder concerned about losses incurred because of the fraud, a judicial official said. The Bank of France, the country's central bank, said it was immediately informed of the fraud and was investigating.

Societe Generale's shares, which have lost nearly half their value over the past six months, were suspended in Paris on Thursday morning, then dropped 5.5 percent to 74.77 euros ($108.97) when they resumed trading.

The bank said it detected the fraud -- comparable to a full year of its profits in stable times -- at its French markets division the weekend of Jan. 19-20.

Once uncovered, Bouton said the bank alerted market regulators and moved immediately to close the trader's positions, incurring heavy losses amid sharp declines on world markets.

"This is a bad time for banks and the industry in general. But detecting the fraud over the weekend was problematic because world stock markets on Monday and Tuesday fell hugely around the world. When the positions had to be unwound, the bank did that in a terrible market of falling equities," said Janine Dow, senior director at Fitch Ratings financial institution group in Paris

"In hindsight, it was this guy's superior knowledge of the control system of every aspect of trading at the bank that allowed him to build up fraudulent positions and hide them," she said.

The bank said the trader had misled investors in 2007 and 2008 through a "scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions." The trader, who was not named, used his knowledge of the group's security systems to conceal his fraudulent positions, the statement said.

The man admitted to the fraud, the bank said, and was being dismissed. Four or five of his supervisors were to leave the group. Bouton offered to resign but the board rejected that.

The trader had worked for the bank since 2000 and earned a salary and bonus of less than euro100,000 (US$145,700), executives said.

"I'm convinced he acted alone," said Jean-Pierre Mustier, chief executive of the bank's corporate and investment banking, who interviewed the trader when the fraud was uncovered.

The trader was responsible for basic futures hedging on European equity market indexes, the company said. That means he made bets on how the markets would perform at a future date.

Until last year, the trader had been betting that markets would fall, but then changed his position at the start of this year to bet they would rise, said Kinner Lakhani, an analyst at ABN Amro in London who specializes in Societe Generale shares, citing the bank's management.

He said there had been "daily rumors" this week that something was afoot at Societe Generale. "The market was sniffing something," he said.

Because the trader previously had worked in trading accounting offices, "he would have known how the risk management worked," Lakhani added. In a conference call with analysts on Thursday, bank officials "talked about this guy bypassing systems and setting up false counter-trades."

Societe Generale said the trader was involved in "plain vanilla" forms of hedging. Futures trading began with selling commodities like sugar or oil to be delivered at a future date, but has expanded enormously to many kinds of extremely complex financial instruments.

The fraud appeared to be the largest ever by a single trader. If confirmed, it would far outstrip the Nick Leeson trading scandal in 1995 that forced the collapse of British bank Barings. Leeson, the bank's Singapore general manager of futures trading, lost 860 million pounds -- then worth US$1.38 billion -- on Asian futures markets, wiping out the bank's cash reserves. The company had been in business for more than 230 years.

The fraud was not as big as the 1991 scandal that led to the demise of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Claims by depositors and creditors there exceeded US$10 billion at the time. International bank regulators seized BCCI, which had headquarters in Luxembourg, London and the Cayman Islands, acting on auditors' reports that described huge losses from illegal loans to corporate insiders and from trading transactions.

Axel Pierron, senior analyst at Celent, an international financial research and consulting firm, was stunned that 13 years after the Barings collapse, something similar has happened.

"The situation reveals that banks, despite the implementation of sophisticated risk management solutions, are still under the threat that an employee with a good understanding of the risk management processes can getting round them to hide his losses," he said.

At Societe Generale, the announcement came on the back of 2.05 billion euros ($2.99 billion) in write-downs linked to subprime-related difficulties and the crisis in financial markets.

The bank is now planning a capital hike in the "following weeks" by selling shares in a rights offer underwritten by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley.

The write-down and losses will lead the company to post a net profit of 600 million euros to 800 million euros ($874 million to $1.16 billion) for all of 2007, the Paris-based bank said. Full-year results will be announced Feb. 21. In 2006, net profit was euro5.2 billion.

Associated Press writers Matt Moore in Davos, Switzerland, Thomas Wagner in London and John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report.

Kenyan rivals meet for first time since elections

By KATY POWNALL, Associated Press Writer

NAIROBI, Kenya - Kenya's president and its main opposition leader met Thursday for the first time since the disputed Dec. 27 presidential vote sparked nationwide violence that left hundreds dead.

President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga arrived at the president's office in downtown Nairobi for the meeting. They were accompanied by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who brokered their talks and is mediating.

Kibaki had insisted on direct talks with Odinga, who refused to meet without a mediator. Annan is leading a mediation mission of the African Union that began work Wednesday.

Some 700 people have been killed in violence that erupted after Kibaki was declared winner of the elections despite a deeply flawed vote tally.

International allies have urged Kibaki and Odinga to negotiate a power-sharing agreement that might create a new position of prime minister for Odinga.

Kibaki told Annan that he wants to resolve the political crisis, a government statement said.

"President Kibaki also informed Mr. Annan ... on steps his government was taking to open political dialogue and ensure national reconciliation and healing," the statement said.

In another encouraging sign, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni won an agreement from both sides to set up a judicial commission to investigate vote rigging. Museveni met separately with Kibaki and Odinga on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Annan persuaded Odinga to call off protests that had been planned for Thursday in defiance of a government ban. Scores of Odinga's supporters have been gunned down by riot police in earlier demonstrations.

New York-based Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, said Thursday it has evidence that opposition party leaders "actively fomented," organized and directed ethnic attacks in Kenya's western Rift Valley, where some of the worst violence has been perpetrated in the aftermath of the disputed election.

Human Rights Watch said more attacks are being planned on members of Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe. An opposition legislator from the region denied the charges.