LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The first international meeting with experts from 15 countries to focus on the Arab spring and returning embezzled funds to Arab nations ended Tuesday afternoon 24 January in Lausanne with a call for greater coordination. The meeting was the sixth in the Lausanne Process, launced in 2001 by Switzerland’s Foreign Affairs Department to promote dialogue between countries affected by corruption and recipient countries of illicitly acquired assets.
The two-day meeting in Lausanne, in the run-up to the World Economic Forum in Davos, pulled in government representatives, specialists and advisors from international organizations to review “first lessons learned”, one year after the toppling of dictatorships in the Middle East began. Switzerland, which was the first country to freeze Tunisian leaders’ assets, 19 January 2011, said in September that the CHF60 million identified in Switzerland is only a small part of the billions hidden but that recipient countries will have to work closely to untangle the money trails.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Switzerland’s new bank regulatory body has outlined its strategic goals for the next three years, highlighting increased supervision of the markets and more effective enforcement. It has promised the government it will deal with the problem of TBTF (too-big-to-fail) institutions. The Swiss government Wednesday 30 September approved Finma’s (Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority) goals.
Finma was put together from three existing supervisory bodies, and came into existence 1 January 2009. It had its baptism by fire with the financial crisis, beginning with the collapse of Lehman Brothers one year ago and the UBS crisis late in 2008, a consequence of the bank’s incursion into the sub-prime market. The Swiss government had to step in with guarantees and huge purchases of UBS convertible bonds to ensure the bank’s solvency during the early days of the crisis.
Finma’s goals state that “the systemic importance and damage potential of large, complex institutions” (like UBS and Credit Suisse) needs to be reduced to a politically acceptable level.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Libya withdrew more than CHF5 billion in assets held in Swiss bank accounts in 2008, wire service ATS reports, in a story carried by several Swiss papers. The sharp scaledown in holdings plus the fact that the new Swiss charge d’affaires has not been able allowed to present his credentials in Tripoli could mean that Libya is carrying out threats it made in July 2008 after Hannibal Qadaffi, the son of the country’s leader, was arrested in Geneva. In October 2008 the Libyan wire service published a report saying that Libya was removing the cash it had in Swiss accounts, which it estimated to be CHF7 billion.
