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.

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.