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A City trader who believed he had a �magic touch� gambled away �1.4 billion in Britain's biggest ever alleged banking fraud, a court heard today. Investment banker Kweku Adoboli, 32, allegedly invented fictitious accounts to conceal the massive losses he was making at Swiss bank UBS from risky deals. Southwark Crown Court heard the �rogue trader� was �fraudulently side-stepping� his bank�s rules but then cooked the books to make it look as if the money he was gambling had been balanced by cash coming in. His losses totalled �1.4billion � wiping around 10 per cent or about �2.8billion off UBS�s share price.He is accused of two counts of fraud and two counts of false accounting while working for Swiss bank UBS between October 2008 and last September. Prosecuting, Sasha Wass QC said: �He is on trial because he lost his bank $2.3 billion (�1.4 billion). He fraudulently gambled it away. He also in doing so wiped around 10% or about 4.5 billion US dollars (�2.8 billion) off the bank's share price. �He did all of this by exceeding his trading limits, by inventing fictitious deals to conceal this and then he lied to his bosses. �Mr Adoboli's motive for this behaviour was to increase his bonus, his status within the bank, his job prospects and of course his ego. �Like most gamblers, he believed he had the magic touch. Like most gamblers, when he lost, he caused chaos and disaster to himself and all of those around him.� Adoboli, from Whitechapel, east London, is accused of losing the money in Britain's biggest alleged banking fraud. He worked for UBS's global synthetic equities division, buying and selling exchange traded funds (ETFs), which track different types of stocks, bonds or commodities such as metals. UBS discovered in September last year that Adoboli's deals had caused the bank a loss of �1.4 billion after �his fraud had unravelled�. Ms Wass said: �To put the huge trading loss in some sort of perspective, 2.3 billion US dollars is enough to pay a year's salary for nearly 70,000 new nurses or two Wembley stadiums or perhaps even six new hospitals. �This colossal loss arose purely as a result of Mr Adoboli's fraudulent deal making, which amounted as you will see, to nothing more than gambling.� She told the jury that Adoboli had �fraudulently side-stepped� the bank's rules that banned high risk and unauthorised investments. His bank sets a daily trading limit for the ETF desk of 100 billion US dollars while using hedging to reduce risk - buying one type of investment and simultaneously selling a similar one to mitigate any loss. But prosecutors claim Adoboli failed to hedge several of his investments in order to make a bigger profit and larger bonus for himself. Ms Wass said: 'When you put your life savings in a pension fund you do not expect an investment banker to gamble it on the toss of a coin. You expect him to limit the downside and maximise the growth of the investment for your old age.' She said there was a 'fundamental difference' between a gambler and an investment banker. 'A gambler takes uncertain risks playing games of chance risking all, whereas an investment banker is investing money or making trades taking extreme care to reduce his risk as much as possible by insuring or hedging against loss when a price falls. 'The gambler relies on chance, he wins or he loses. The investment bank trader is investing to make his bank's or his clients' investments grow and he goes to great lengths to ensure that he cannot lose all or even a substantial amount of his investor's stake.