Tweet
Swiss banking watchdog snaps at heels of UBS
The leading Swiss banking regulator is preparing to investigate how UBS, the country’s biggest bank and the world’s largest wealth manager, ran up vast losses in the global credit crisis.
Alain Bichsel, a spokesman for the Federal Banking Commission, told the Swiss weekly Sonntag.CH that the regulator “will investigate how these enormous writedowns” arose, including “who was responsible for it”.
He said that the commission was also increasing the pressure on the Swiss banking giant to bolster its capital base to overcome the credit crisis quickly. UBS said this month that it had been forced to raise its writedowns to about $14 billion (£7 billion) from a previously reported figure of $10 billion, making it one of the worst-hit victims of the global credit crunch. UBS, which had no immediate comment yesterday, already is the subject of an investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission into the mis-selling of sub-prime mortgage debt and the liquidity crisis that followed.
The group’s dismal performance in recent months has forced it to seek external help. Last week UBS was forced to issue a 9 per cent stake to the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation and a second, smaller stake to an investor from the Middle East, thought to be based in Saudi Arabia, to boost its balance sheet.
.
.
.
Alain Bichsel, a spokesman for the Federal Banking Commission, told the Swiss weekly Sonntag.CH that the regulator “will investigate how these enormous writedowns” arose, including “who was responsible for it”.
He said that the commission was also increasing the pressure on the Swiss banking giant to bolster its capital base to overcome the credit crisis quickly. UBS said this month that it had been forced to raise its writedowns to about $14 billion (£7 billion) from a previously reported figure of $10 billion, making it one of the worst-hit victims of the global credit crunch. UBS, which had no immediate comment yesterday, already is the subject of an investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission into the mis-selling of sub-prime mortgage debt and the liquidity crisis that followed.
The group’s dismal performance in recent months has forced it to seek external help. Last week UBS was forced to issue a 9 per cent stake to the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation and a second, smaller stake to an investor from the Middle East, thought to be based in Saudi Arabia, to boost its balance sheet.
.
.
.