Barings Bank
Britain's oldest merchant bank — it had financed the Napoleonic Wars and the Louisiana Purchase — owes its 1995 bankruptcy to Singapore general manager Nick Leeson. After successfully resolving a back-office mess at the Barings's Jakarta office, Leeson went to Singapore in 1992 to trade in low-risk arbitrage opportunities between derivatives contracts on the Singapore Mercantile Exchange and Japan's Osaka Exchange. But he did more than that: Leeson's unauthorized (and unlucky) derivatives and futures speculation eventually racked up $1.4 billion in losses. By falsifying accounts, Leeson was able to hide the losses from Barings management until he fled to Indonesia in February 1995, leaving the company bankrupt. After his eventual arrest and trial on charges of fraud, Leeson was sentenced to six and a half years in a Singapore prison. He was released for good behavior in 1999.

Cendant
In 1998 — a year after it was formed by the merger of HFS Inc., a group of travel and real estate brands, and CUC International, a direct marketing group — Cendant Corp. disclosed that over the course of a decade, CUC had inflated its income by more than $500 million. Cendant's stock lost almost half its value — some $14 billion — in a single day. Cendant later revealed that operating profits over the three years beginning in 1995 were inflated by $640 million. Last year, Cendant vice chairman Kirk Shelton was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in the scandal; as of January 26, the jury in the retrial of chairman Walter Forbes was still deadlocked.

At the time of the initial disclosure, Cendant's accounting scandal was the biggest in U.S. history. That, of course, was years ago, in the 1990s.

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