Trial of SMBC'S Trevor Hill smacks of case against ex-Nissan executive Greg Kelly

TOKYO — In March 2022, Tokyo Metropolitan Police officials knocked on the door of Tokyo resident and SMBC Nikko Senior Managing Executive Officer Trevor Hill (52) and served a search warrant. They then turned his central Tokyo apartment upside down and confiscated his phones and computers as well as a large amount of irrelevant personal paperwork.

Hill was taken to Tokyo’s notorious Kosuge Detention Center, where he was locked into solitary confinement in a tiny cell for close to a month and subjected to grueling daily interrogations. He was one of five bank executives arrested and questioned for market manipulation, including three Japanese and another foreign executive. Before these arrests, a senior Japanese trader in his 50’s who was also part of the team, and therefore investigation, died of a brain aneurysm shortly after multiple interrogation sessions with the regulators that lasted late into the night several days in a row.