Switzerland

Switzerland refused a request for assistance to help bring prosecutions here on the basis of the leaked HSBC Geneva banking files, according to the Irish Revenue Commissioners. Revenue chairman Niall Cody has also told the Dáil Committee of Public Accounts that 13 people are the subject of ongoing investigations arising from the Swiss data, with the amount in their accounts involving a maximum of $14.83 million.

The Swiss National Bank ’s decision to scrap its cap on the franc’s value will weigh on the Alpine country’s economy and could lead to one or two quarters of contraction, the head of the central bank, Thomas Jordan, said Saturday. The Zurich-based SNB stunned financial markets last month when it abandoned its 3½-year-old cap for the franc-euro, sending the Swiss stock market plunging and pushing the franc sharply higher, The Wall Street Journal reported. The SNB had no option but to exit its minimum exchange rate policy as “the international environment had changed,” Mr.

Administrators for currency trading firm Alpari (UK) Ltd said they had received a number of inquiries from potential buyers of the business hit by heavy losses from last week's surge in the value of the Swiss franc, Reuters reported. Alpari lost millions of dollars after the Swiss National Bank removed its currency cap on Thursday and administrators appointed on Monday said that efforts to find a buyer for Alpari (UK) over the weekend failed and they would hold talks with interested suitors in the coming days. U.S.

Sputnik Engineering, the parent company of Swiss inverter manufacturer Solarmax, will file for insolvency in Switzerland this week PV Tech has learned. In a circular sent to customers and seen by PV Tech, the company said it had looked for alternatives but to no avail. “The employees have been informed this morning and will stop working today until further notice,” it said in the statement. The company is not the first European manufacturer to struggle as the domestic market declined and competition increased.

A Swiss financial company embroiled in the Espírito Santo saga is in the process of largely shutting down, according to people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Lausanne-based company, Eurofin Holding SA, is selling or spinning off businesses and winding down asset portfolios, these people said. It is possible that parts of the company will emerge in some form under a different name, one person said.

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.