© Reuters. Federal Councillor and chief of the finance federal division Karin Keller-Sutter attends a information convention on Credit score Suisse after UBS takeover supply, in Bern, Switzerland, March 19, 2023. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
ZURICH (Reuters) – Switzerland’s finance minister defended the shotgun merger between the nation’s two largest banks in an interview with Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung on Saturday, saying using emergency regulation was essential to stabilise the state of affairs.
“Credit score Suisse wouldn’t have survived Monday,” Karin Keller-Sutter mentioned, explaining the necessity to discover a swift resolution for Credit score Suisse’s woes.
“With no resolution, fee transactions with CS in Switzerland would have been considerably disrupted, presumably even collapsed, and wages and payments might now not have been paid,” she mentioned.
Final Sunday it was introduced that UBS had agreed to purchase its rival Credit score Suisse for 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.23 billion) in inventory and agreed to imagine as much as 5 billion francs ($5.4 billion) in losses in a merger engineered by Swiss authorities to stop extra market turmoil in world banking.
Emergency regulation was used to allow the banks to achieve a speedy settlement. Shareholders, for instance, who would usually get a say in such a takeover have been largely bypassed, which has angered a few of them.
Keller-Sutter mentioned the Swiss authorities’s govt Federal Council “solely went so far as was completely essential to realize the aim of stabilisation”.
“If we had achieved nothing, CS shares would have been nugatory on Monday and the shareholders would have gone house empty-handed,” she mentioned.
($1 = 0.9199 Swiss francs)
