Switzerland

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.

A unit of the Swiss bank UBS has been placed under formal investigation in France following allegations that it designed investments to help its clients evade taxes, the International Herald Tribune reported. The move comes more than a year after an inquiry was opened regarding the bank’s operations in France, a UBS executive briefed on the matter said Sunday. A handful of UBS executives have been put under investigation since the inquiry began in 2012.

Switzerland is not a member of the 27-nation European Union and it has its own currency, pegged to the euro. It has escaped the worst of a crisis that has affected countries of the euro zone and charted its own course during the Continent’s economic downturn, the International Herald Tribune Rendezvous blog reported. Despite some public resistance to budget cuts, it has also avoided the sort of harsh austerity measures that the European Union authorities have imposed on member states fighting to reduce their mountains of debt.

Swiss voters on Sunday overwhelmingly backed a plan giving shareholders sweeping authority over executive pay, the latest in a series of moves aimed at curbing what is seen as excessive remuneration levels at top companies, The Wall Street Journal reported. Roughly 68% of those who voted supported the Minder Initiative, named after the businessman and politician who created it, according to the government. The 24-item measure enables shareholders of Swiss companies to approve or block proposed compensation for corporate executives and board members.

The Swiss government ordered banks to hold additional capital as a buffer against risks posed by the country’s biggest property boom in two decades, Bloomberg reported. Banks will be forced to hold an extra 1 percent of risk- weighted assets linked to domestic residential mortgages, the government in Bern said in a statement. Lenders would have to add about 3 billion francs ($3.26 billion) to comply with the new rules, which will be enforced from Sept. 30.

Credit Suisse Group AG will accept a debt restructuring plan that Vietnam Shipbuilding Industry Group put to its creditors, helping to resolve negotiations surrounding a default that occurred more than two years ago, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Swiss lender sent a letter to about 20 other creditors of the Hanoi-based company, telling them it plans to accept the proposal and outlining the rationale for them to do the same, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.