Rakesh Saxena (born 13 July 1952, at Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India) is an Indian convicted criminal, financier and trader in the derivatives market. He is accused of embezzlement in the 1990s from his work as treasury adviser to the Bangkok Bank of Commerce (BBC) and is widely reputed to have been engaged in dozens of high risk ventures and deals throughout the world over the previous three decades. In October 2009, he was deported to Thailand after fighting the longest extradition battle in Canadian history, which lasted 13 years. In June 2012 Saxena was jailed for 10 years by Bangkok South Criminal Court, and ordered to pay US$41 million in fines and compensation, after being convicted five counts of securities fraud between 1992 and 1995. Early years Rakesh Saxena was born 13 July 1952 in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India. As a child he studied in England, because his mother was an international lawyer. He later lived in New Delhi, India and studied at St Columba's School, and St. Stephen's College. While in university he developed strong Marxist political leanings and by 1974 he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in English. He worked in a foreign exchange and money market brokerage company, where he concentrated on complex financial transactions and foreign exchange speculation, first in Delhi, Bombay, Sri Lanka and Singapore, and then for the Oriental Bank of Commerce in Delhi, made many fraud deals and put the bank to around 4 crore loss before the Indian government nationalized it. In the late-1970s, Saxena moved to Hong Kong, where he met his wife, a Thai national. In Hong Kong, he worked as a foreign exchange dealer in Kowloon in the 1980s, and then joined Wocom Commodities. He moved his base to Bangkok in 1985 where the Bank of Thailand had announced the opening up of the forex markets. He then shifted focus to the derivatives arena. In Bangkok, Saxena dealt in speculation on buying and selling companies and wrote a financial column in the Bangkok Post, spoke in seminars of foreign exchange trading and formed numerous contacts in the business community. Among his interests were mines in Sierra Leone, companies in Australia, Belize, Canada, Cayman Islands, Russia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Israel, Cyprus and the Virgin Islands, and a number of Swiss bank accounts. Bangkok Bank of Commerce In 1989, Saxena became advisor to Krirk-kiat Jalichandra, new senior vice-president of