The case

In the legal dispute between France and UBS, the court acquitted one of the six UBS bankers also on trial. The prosecution has decided to appeal the acquittal: Raoul Weil, the former head of wealth management at UBS, was acquitted by the French judiciary. The prosecution however won’t have any of it and announced its intention to appeal the ruling, according to information in today’s NZZ. Weil was the only one to escape without a guilty verdict in the trial against UBS that ended last month. The bank and five ex-UBS bankers were convicted on charges of money laundering and abiding tax evasion. UBS was ordered to pay 4.5 billion euros in fines and damages. The bank didn’t accept the ruling and appealed the verdict. The France judiciary will now revisit the case and a new trial date will likely be set in two years’ time.

Source: Swiss press

The commentary

Today NZZ gives a lot of space to the UBS process in France and finds that UBS’s legal fight in France is “good”. An out of court settlement would have been “disastrous” for the reputation of the Swiss banking industry. In the same issue, the NZZ notes that banks are “struggling without banking secrecy”: since 2007, the cross-border business has declined by approximately CHF 600 billion to CHF 3500 billion assets under management. The NZZ also points out that Switzerland threatens the “black list” and that it could be placed on the list of tax havens. For now, Switzerland remains on the grey list and thus under observation.

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