When I saw the headline from a story out of the UK this week that "Regulators ban trader for huge drunken trades," I thought that surely it was a follow-up article on David Redmond. Redmond was a freight and oil trader in Morgan Stanley’s Commodities Division in London who the UK's FSA banned from the industry for two years in May 2009 for trading under the influence. The FSA’s report stated that on February 6, 2008, “Mr Redmond took an extended lunch break between 13.14 and 16.41 and it appears that this affected his behaviour on his return to the office, although he was not visibly drunk.” (Of course, as the website Solicitr.com observed, while Redmond may have received a ban, "mutterings of ‘legend’ can be heard in pubs across the City”).

But this week's headline is not about Redmond, but about yet another London oil trader banned by the FSA for making trades while drunk. The FSA stated on Wednesday that it has banned Steven Noel Perkins, a former oil futures broker in the London office of PVM Oil Futures, from the industry for five years because he allegedly "made huge trades while drunk last year, causing global prices of Brent crude to jump to abnormally high levels." Perkins was also fined £72,000 ($108,400). The FSA banned him on the grounds that he is "not a fit and proper person."

According to the FSA, the trading at issue came after Perkins drank "excessively" over the weekend of June 27-28 and throughout the following Monday before making the trades.