France 31 January :- French bank Societe Generale's board on Wednesday kept Daniel Bouton as the bank's CEO, rebuffing French President Nicolas Sarkozy's demand for the bank's leaders to face up to their responsibilities of a trading fraud.

The bank said that it was keeping its top people in place, asking Bouton and his deputy Philippe Citerne to stay on through the crisis.

"The board is asking to stay at the helm of the boat during this storm," Bouton said in his first television interview on the crisis, "I am a man of duty. I'm not going to jump overboard when the board is asking me to stay to do my duty."

The bank has twice backed Bouton, who offered to resign as the trading crisis unfolded last week which cost the bank a record loss of 7 billion U. S. dollars in bad debts.

The bank has been in turmoil since the trading scandal was revealed which is blamed on rogue share trades by Jerome Kerviel, 31, who had worked at Societe Generale in Paris since 2000 and earned a salary and bonus of less than 100,000 euros (145,700 dollars).