ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – UK and Swiss banking regulators are reported by the Wall St Journal to be planning to fine Swiss bank UBS for shortcomings in supervising risky trades. The newspaper cites “people close to the situation”, noting that regulators from the two countries will complete their investigations by mid-February into the $23. billion loss by trade Kweku Adoboli.
The former UBS employee pleaded not guilty Monday morning 30 January in London to charges of fraud.
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss National Bank Wednesday took the unusual step of publishing its internal regulations governing the private financial activities of its senior management, as part of efforts to clear chairman Philipp Hildebrand’s name in the face of accusations he profited from his position.
By comparison, other central banks tend to make public their regulations concerning investment and disclosure for senior management.
The SNB also published the independent report from an investigation it had asked PricewaterhouseCoopers to make into Hildebrand’s transactions, which the banker’s wife, a former currency trader, said were her own.
Documents were taken from Bank Sarasin and given to a lawyer who is close to the right-wing UDC People’s Party that purportedly showed Hildebrand and his wife making a CHF60,000-plus profit on currency transactions.
Hildebrand is scheduled to meet the press Thursday in Zurich, to clarify the situation.
SNB internal regulations (German and French) and the PwC report (Ger)
Bloomberg/Business Week article, including EU and US Federal Reserve regulations on management private investment rules
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Renzo Gadola, former UBS wealth management senior banker, was given a sentence of five year’s probation last week in Florida after he was earlier found guilty of helping wealthy Americans evade US taxes by hiding their assets in offshore accounts.
It came out in a court document, “Motion for Downward Departure From Sentencing Guidelines“, filed 15 November that he cooperated with investigators by recording meetings with clients as well as turning over the names of other bankers who are suspected of criminal activity. The document requested that he be treated leniently in sentencing because of his cooperation.
Gadola began to work with investigators shortly after he was arrested, the document notes. He is credited by US media with leading US Justice Department investigators to other bankers who have reportedly helped clients defraud the IRS through Swiss banks. The information he supplied showed for the first time that cantonal banks in Switzerland may also have been involved in hiding US clients’ money.
Former UBS banker “wishes to continue” working with US Justice Department
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Cécile B, as Cécile Bosshard was familiarly known during her 2008 trial for murdering Geneva banking family scion Edouard Stern, has been released from prison early on good behaviour, her lawyer told AFP news agency.
The Frenchwoman had been in prison since 2005, but was sentenced in June 2009 to 8.5 years. Stern’s lover, who had been promised money and marriage, but received neither, famously shot him at close range while he was tied to a chair, wearing a latex suit, during sex games where, she insisted, he insulted her.
She has reportedly been told to leave the country, with a ban on visiting Switzerland in the next 10 years.
- related articles on the Stern murder, GenevaLunch
- GenevaLunch, in partnership with Swiss news magazine l’Hebdo: two-part report on the murder trial, June 2009
The media hoopla promises to be huge as the three-week trial gets underway in Paris of Jérôme Kerviel, accused of a list of crimes that includes breach of trust and unauthorized use of a computer. Kerviel is the trader who was discovered in January 2008 to have lost €4.9bn at Société Générale, before the world’s banking system as a whole went haywire. The saga of one young man nearly pulling down a large French bank was headline news for weeks, but Kerviel then dropped out of the news, eclipsed by the fall of Lehman Brothers and then the global financial crisis as it unfolded. But now the question resurfaces, with implications for banks that were not as clear in early 2008: could one trader, acting alone, really gamble half the value of a large bank without his superiors knowing about it? The bank’s lawyers say yes, while Kerviel’s say no. Stay tuned.
Links to other sites: Euronews, Financial Times, Guardian, Le Monde (Fre)
US and UK authorities are scrambling to check on possible terrorist links Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab might have to Al Qaeda, particularly in Yemen. He is the man who tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet with 300 people aboard 25 December, Christmas Day. Details about his background are gradually surfacing, after it became known that his father, a top banker in Nigeria, warned the US a month ago that he was concerned about his son’s extremist views. The plane he tried to explode was flying from Amsterdam, The Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan in the US.
Update 21 August Miami, Florida, USA (GenevaLunch) - A banker for NZB (Neue Zürcher Bank), Hansruedi Schumacher, and a Geneva and Zurich lawyer, Matthias Rickenbach, both Swiss, were indicted Thursday 20 August in Miami, Florida on charges of conspiring to defraud the US. The two are accused by the US of helping US residents to evade American taxes, including Jeffrey Chernick of New York and John McCarthy of Pasadena, California, two of four UBS clients who recently have been indicted for tax fraud after their names were given to the IRS in February 2009 by the bank, and who turned themselves in.
The two are accused, among other things, of telling “a New York businessman they paid an unnamed Swiss government official a $45,000 bribe for information on whether the businessman’s account would be revealed to US investigators,” Associated Press reports court documents as stating. AP also says the two are in Switzerland and it is not clear if they have US attorneys to represent them.
The New York Times says the new indictments indicate “that the American authorities are starting to pursue smaller players that may have helped Americans hide their money.”
Update 18:05 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch, agencies and other media) – Cécile Brossard, the murderer of Edouard Stern, has been found guilty by a jury in Geneva of homicide for killing her lover 28 February 2005. The jury will decide Thursday on her sentence, up to 20 years in prison.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The drama of the trial of Cécile Brossard for the murder of Edouard Stern in Geneva finished its first day with two surprises. The husband of the accused, a naturopathy doctor in Clarens, Vaud, told the court that he leaned his wife was having an affair with Stern only after the murder. He understood that his wife was the “sexual secretary” for the French banker based in Geneva. At one point she asked him to give a massage to Stern, who was suffering from back problems. Stern later insulted him, calling him a cuckold.
The second surprise of the day was that the million dollars that caused a tug-of-war between Stern and Brossard is still sitting in an account with Credit Suisse in Montreux, earning interest.
The trial is scheduled to run until 19 June.
Swiss news weekly L’Hebdo magazine’s 2 June edition features on its cover the murder trial of Cécile Brossard, accused of killing her lover, wealthy French banker Edouard Stern, in 2007. GenevaLunch, a partner of l’Hebdo, brings you the English version in two parts, with an introduction by GL editor Ellen Wallace.
French version © 2009 l’Hebdo
English version © 2009 GenevaLunch (may not be reproduced in part or whole without written permission). Translation: Sean Ecker
Background: The trial of Cécile Brossard for murdering Edouard Stern opens in Geneva 10 June, and is expected to run to 19 June. With 30 journalists accredited, it will likely remain in the headlines for the length of the trial. She has admitted to murdering her lover, divorced banker Edouard Stern, one of France’s wealthiest men, who was 50 at the time of his death in February 2005. The killing – four gunshots at his luxurious apartment in central Geneva – sparked enormous media interest at the time. The story was a hot mix: money, world travel, an on-again off-again affair he had with a woman 16 years his junior who came from a middle-class small-town French background while he came from generations of banking wealth, and then there was the death scene, with the victim found dressed in a head to toe latex suit that was part of their sadomasochistic sexual games. And then tales of his manipulative behaviour began to eke out, while other observers questioned his killer’s words.
The trial adds to this two well-known lawyers and public curiosity about the woman who committed the crime. Swiss media have already warmed up for the trial: the Tribune de Genève writes of obscure plots, disinformation being spread and swissinfo (in French) relates a tale of passion, power and sex. Suisse Illustré asks, diabolical Mata Hari or fragile woman? TSR, which is putting three journalists on the story, has a video blog to follow the trial.
The story according to L’Hebdo:
