Advertisement ::

Enlarge Cartoon

by Peter Gaechter

UBS has announced that it will close a huge, billion-dollar real estate fund, causing consternation and distress among its many investors, many of them smaller, private investors, according to the usually well-informed Swiss Sunday newspaper, Sonntagszeitung 13 December. That a real estate fund is in trouble should not come as a surprise. Investors who lose money on their punts know what they are getting into, even if it is, or was, a UBS fund.

Mortgage as bonus

In other news that is sure to cause more consternation and distress, employees of the bank’s US wealth management division will be entitled to interest-free  loans worth up to 65 percent of the income they bring in to the bank. This very generous step was forced onto the bank in an effort to keep its 7,200 wealth management employees in the USA from deserting. If the employee stays with the bank long enough, he or she won’t have to pay back the loan. That is in addition to the regular bonus program. Of course, UBS didn’t get any government bailout money in the US, and the Swiss government, which did bail out UBS in Switzerland, can’t really say anything about bonus policy in a part of the bank not under its regulatory supervision. Smart.

Ospel won’t go on trial

And there is good news for the bank’s former CEO, Marcel Ospel, who won’t have to go through the tedious experience of a trial for alleged tax fraud, falsification of documents, and the wilfully unsound management of his business. The Zurich public prosecutor’s office has decided not to press charges against him, having learned from the Swissair case how difficult it is to prove such things. Ospel was of course also intimately involved in the demise of Swissair, and the Zurich public prosecutor well knows how the Swiss business elite closes ranks against outsiders.

On the plus side, at least the bank’s shareholders, or the country’s citizens, will not have to pay for his legal costs.

But the bank’s most egregious misdemeanour in the past few years has been its ongoing assault on the English language with its long-running “You and Us” campaign. Every child knows that You and Us = Us. And we all know that people use Us as the object of a sentence. You and We, which I would let by if I were correcting an English test, is simply We. You and Us. We. Not much of an advertising campaign.

You be Us. I think not.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.