Switzerland

The Swiss private banking arm of HSBC has been charged by Belgian authorities with assisting wealthy individuals to avoid paying taxes on several billion dollars in assets, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. A Belgian investigating magistrate judge has charged the unit, HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), with serious and organized tax fraud, money laundering and unlawful exercise of the profession of financial intermediary, according to a statement by the Brussels prosecutor’s office. The activity under scrutiny occurred from 2003 to the present, prosecutors said.

Monarch Airlines has agreed a rescue deal that will result in Switzerland’s Mantegazza dynasty, who started the business with just two aircraft in Luton in 1968, selling up completely, The Telegraph reported. Family patriarch Sergio Mantegazza is understood to have become impatient with the airline’s financial troubles after Monarch asked for a third bailout in July despite already injecting £75m into the business in 2011, just two years after putting £45m into the business.

A Swiss financial regulator said on Wednesday that it had initiated enforcement proceedings against a Swiss bank with ties to the Espírito Santo family’s troubled group of companies, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, or Finma, said it was investigating the role of Banque Privée Espírito Santo in the distribution of securities and financial products of one of the family companies.

Credit Suisse helped put together billions of dollars in securities that were issued by offshore investment vehicles of Banco Espirito Santo SA and then sold to the Portuguese bank's retail customers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. In the article in its online edition, the newspaper cited corporate filings and people familiar with the situation, saying customers didn't know the investment vehicles were loaded with debt issued by various Espirito Santo companies and served as a mechanism to finance the Portuguese conglomerate.

Credit Suisse has done what no other huge bank has done in over two decades: plead guilty to criminal wrongdoing, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. In a sign that global banking giants are no longer immune from criminal charges — despite public concerns that financial institutions have grown so large and interconnected that they are “too big to jail” — federal prosecutors demanded that Credit Suisse’s parent company plead guilty to helping thousands of American account holders hide their wealth and evade taxes.

Switzerland, the world’s largest offshore financial centre, has pledged automatically to hand the details of foreign bank accounts to other countries in one of the most significant breakthroughs in the global crackdown on evasion, the Financial Times reported. At a ministerial meeting in Paris on Tuesday, Switzerland agreed to sign up to a new global standard on automatic information exchange, representing a decisive break with its centuries-old commitment to protecting the privacy of banking clients.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc's bankruptcy estate has struck a deal to resolve a five-year-long dispute involving its Swiss affiliate, clearing the way to distribute $1.8 billion to creditors, Reuters reported. The deal would enable the estate of Lehman to resolve one of its largest outstanding claims since the investment bank's September 2008 collapse, a major spark in the global financial crisis, and close a settlement from last year with Lehman Brothers Finance AG, the Swiss affiliate that specialized in equities derivatives. The settlement with the Swiss unit was approved by the U.S.

Switzerland’s property market is at greater risk of overheating, raising the question as to whether authorities have done enough to curtail the boom, Bloomberg News reported. The UBS Swiss Real Estate Bubble Index rose to 1.23 points in the fourth quarter from 1.2 points in the third, according to a statement from UBS AG today. A reading above 2 indicates a bubble. “The potential for correction has increased further,” Matthias Holzhey and Claudio Saputelli at UBS in Zurich said.

Switzerland stepped back from a movement to control corporate pay, overwhelmingly rejecting an initiative that would have restricted executive salaries to 12 times that of the lowest paid employee, The Wall Street Journal reported. Roughly 65% of Swiss voters Sunday opposed the 1:12 Initiative for Fair Pay, according to results from all of the country's 26 cantons reported by Swiss television. Another 34% supported the proposal, which was named for the organizers' belief that no one in a Swiss company should earn more in a month than someone else makes in a year.

Switzerland's biggest publicly backed lender is being saddled with more stringent rules, in the latest move by regulators in the Alpine nation to corral risk in the financial sector, The Wall Street Journal reported. On Monday, Zurich-based Zuercher Kantonalbank said the Swiss National Bank, the central bank, is requiring the bank to follow too-big-to-fail rules similar to those that already apply to international giants UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group AG.