Switzerland

Switzerland suffered the highest rise in bankruptcy proceedings in ten years in 2009, according to the Federal Statistics Office, swissinfo.ch reported. The number of proceedings opened against businesses or individuals rose to around 11,600, up eight per cent on 2008 - a “marked increase”, the office said on Monday. In addition, 2.5 million formal notices to pay were issued, just over two per cent more than in the previous year. All regions saw a rise in bankruptcies, but Italian-speaking Ticino, financial centre Zurich and central Switzerland suffered the largest increases.

UBS and Credit Suisse should change their structure to allow their break-up in the case of an insolvency to limit the risks for the Swiss economy, a government commission said on Thursday, Reuters reported. In an interim report on the too-big-to-fail issue, the commission urged lawmakers to enable regulators to force the banks if necessary to adopt a structure that allowed to keep key businesses going in case of an insolvency.

German officials said they were weighing fresh offers from informants after deciding last week to pay €2.5 million ($3.4 million) for the names of suspected tax evaders in what is rapidly evolving into a broad attack on Switzerland's system of banking secrecy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Over the past week, German officials have launched a tactical and rhetorical assault on Swiss banking, a strategy that appears to be aimed at undermining both Switzerland's tradition of secrecy and its pre-eminence as a tax refuge.

The Swiss government will on Wednesday reveal how it will rescue a decisive deal with Washington about bank secrecy after the country’s highest administrative court derailed the agreement last week, the Financial Times reported. Bern agreed in August that UBS should divulge the names of 4,450 Americans with offshore accounts. Bern had been obliged to intervene after escalating US legal pressure threatened to trigger a crisis of confidence in the bank.

The Dutch financial services group ING, which came close to collapse last year, said Friday that this month it would repay half of the €10 billion provided by the government during the height of the financial crisis, The New York Times reported. The bank joins other lenders in Europe and the United States, like UBS of Switzerland and Bank of America, in repaying at least some government funds earlier than anticipated. The Dutch state injected the funds into ING in October 2008 by purchasing nonvoting preferred shares.

Authorities in Britain and Australia have requested information from UBS after the Swiss bank agreed in August to disclose some 4,450 client names to settle a U.S. tax case, the bank confirmed on Sunday, Reuters reported. UBS said in a note to its third-quarter financial statement, published last week, that tax and regulatory authorities in a number of jurisdictions had requested information on cross-border wealth management services provided by UBS and other banks.

Details of a landmark settlement of the U.S. tax case against Swiss bank UBS are expected this week, which should help the bank restore its image and open the way for the Swiss state to sell its UBS stake. The deal could be announced as soon as Wednesday after the first regular meeting of the Swiss cabinet following the summer recess, industry insiders said. The world's second-largest wealth manager will hand over details of about 5,000 client accounts, sources have said, after the signing of a deal agreed last week to end a dispute in which U.S.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) known as the bank for central banks, which was founded in Basel, Switzerland in 1930, issued its 79th Annual Report, and said financial products should be treated like medicines and sold to consumers only when they are certified safe to prevent a repeat of global financial crisis, Finfacts reported. The BIS said government efforts to revive the global economy might have only a temporary impact because banks are not being pushed hard enough to fix their underlying problems.

The Swiss National Bank is attempting to put a “line in the sand” with its first intervention in the foreign-exchange market in more than a decade after previous attempts to weaken the franc failed, Bloomberg reported. Currency traders said the Zurich-based central bank intervened twice yesterday, driving the franc down against more than 150 currencies tracked by Bloomberg. It fell the most in three months versus the dollar and euro. The franc extended declines today.

UBS, the Swiss banking giant that sought help from the nation's central bank last year, said Tuesday that it lost 8.1 billion Swiss francs, or $6.9 billion, in the fourth quarter as it continued to write down the value of some debt assets and wealth management clients withdrew funds, the International Herald Tribune reported. The loss, which was bigger than some analysts expected, compares with a loss of 13 billion francs in the fourth quarter of 2007 and a profit in the third quarter of last year.