UBS New York headquarters
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – There will be no trial of the current and former heads of Swiss bank UBS, the Zurich prosecutor’s office announced Tuesday 15 December. Shortly afterwards, the UBS board announced that it would not press charges, either, against unnamed former senior executives. Swiss politicians have been calling for someone to take responsibility for the most serious banking debacle in Switzerland’s history.
The possibility that the bank might have collapsed at the end of 2008 in the wake of the US sub-prime catastrophe moved the Swiss government to inject billions of Swiss francs into the bank. The public prosecutor in Zurich said that in the case of the sub-prime losses and cross-border case that pitted UBS against US tax authorities, there was no evidence that Swiss law had been broken.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss Socialist Party (PS) filed a criminal complaint Friday 14 August against Marcel Ospel and Peter Kurer, two former chairmen of the board of Swiss banking giant UBS.
The bank’s present difficulties with the US tax authorities, the IRS, can only have been undertaken with the knowledge of its top management, according to SP leader Christian Levrat. He said that if the terms of the agreement initialed between Switzerland and the US require UBS to hand over the names and details of thousands of clients, then it becomes clear that UBS has broken Swiss law, which does not allow tax fraud.
