Swiss bank UBS prepares to cut jobs after $12bn loss

UBS, Europe’s largest bank, is expected to announce thousands of job losses when it reports dismal first-quarter results today.

Most of the layoffs are expected to be at UBS’s investment bank operations in the United States, the source of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that led to the credit crunch.

“The Anglo-Saxon side of the operations will probably carry the burden,” one financial analyst said. “In these countries, the sector is accustomed to many layoffs. In Switzerland they will do it more discreetly.”

The Swiss bank said last month that it expected to report a net loss of about $12 billion (£6 billion) for the quarter, after losses and writedowns of about $19 billion on American real estate and related structured credit positions. Peter Kurer, the bank’s chairman, and Marcel Rohner, its chief executive, indicated at a hostile annual meeting on April 23 that investment banking would be scaled back.

Some Swiss media reports have said UBS is to reduce its workforce this year by up to 8,000, with the first batch of 3,000 to be announced today followed by an additional 5,000 during the summer, which will include administration, both worldwide and in Switzerland.

The magnitude of the losses and of poor risk oversight, which since last summer notched up losses of $37 billion, is still sending shudders through Switzerland’s discreet money world.

“It has affected all of us. UBS was a very successful business model and the big losses are affecting confidence in our industry. It will need a lot of work to rehabilitate prestige in Swiss banking,” Daniel Glasner, president of the Swiss Association of Independent Financial Advisors, said.

Michel Legler, a member of the executive board of the Swiss Futures and Options Association, was more outspoken. “UBS came one day saying that they [had] lost $4 billion. After two weeks they said: ‘Sorry, we lost $16 billion.’ And after one month they announced it was $25 billion. Now we know it’s $37 billion.”

Pierre Christodoulidis, the chief executive of ICSOS Group, the global financial advisers, said that the Swiss financial industry had been shocked by the extent of the losses of UBS.

The losses had piled up despite UBS “having a structure of checks and balances and 3,000 people in charge of surveying risk issues,” he said.

Similarly, the Swiss National Bank in its annual report for 2007 concludes: “Risk measurement and management systems of the international big banks seemed to have partially failed. In particular, liquidity and credit risks had been underestimated.”

At a recent international financial experts conference in Prague, gloomy Swiss bankers and independent money managers said that the crisis was far from over.

“We’ve had quite a rough start, with volumes heavily down, lack of liquidity, and major players heavily hit,” Julien Froidevaux, senior vice-president of Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch & Cie, said.

There was criticism also at the conference for UBS’s top brass, such as Marcel Ospel, the former chairman, and for their overreliance on rating agencies’ assessments of products.

One Geneva private banker went so far as to describe UBS as no longer properly Swiss.

“UBS is a Swiss bank, but half of its clients are located in the United States, so it does not make it a pure Swiss player any more,” he said.