UBS, the embattled Swiss bank, today announced the resignation of chief executive Marcel Rohner. His surprise replacement is Ossie Grübel, the former CEO of UBS’s great domestic rivals Credit Suisse. Rohner’s departure comes after UBS lost well in excess of SFr100 billion of client assets in its key wealth management franchise over the past 12 months. Last week, the Swiss bank paid a fine of almost $800 million to the US authorities to settle a case involving alleged tax evasion of its American private clients.
Rohner gave his last major interview as chief executive of UBS to Euromoney in mid January. In this interview, he foresaw his own departure. As Euromoney wrote: "You sense that when Rohner’s time is up, unlike some of his predecessors, he’ll see it coming. ‘There will always be renewals of management teams,’ he said. ‘Perhaps at UBS there was too little of that in the past, and this could have contributed to the mistakes we made. We are sensitive to this going forward.’” The shock is that UBS has effected that renewal by delving into the past of Credit Suisse.
Read the full interview with Rohner
To find out more about the issues that led to Rohner’s resignation, read our February cover story