To continue to make his voice heard, the Zurich billionaire has created his own YouTube channel “Teleblocher”. In his… 812th episode, broadcast on Friday, he comments on the Credit Suisse affair. “Between Credit Suisse, Swissair or UBS at the time, CS is really the most problematic file. In addition, we don’t know if the solution chosen today will not cause us bigger problems in the future” , he asks himself.
Asked about this on Sunday at 7:30 p.m., Christoph Blocher does not mince words: “It is very bad news to learn that Credit Suisse has been managed in such a pitiful way that it ended up sinking. third time already that incompetent people at the head of companies embark us on such an adventure. It’s always the same thing: we undertake things abroad, where we lose money in operations, and now we find ourselves in this situation where it is impossible to go bankrupt because these companies are too big.”
>> Relive the announcement of the acquisition of Credit Suisse:
UBS buys Credit Suisse for 3 billion francs. Objective: “to restore confidence”
FINMA “made mistakes”
Regarding the chain of responsibility in the Credit Suisse affair, the former UDC minister notably castigated the managers of the second largest bank in Switzerland. “Those who run a business are always responsible for what happens there,” he asserts.
Christoph Blocher also points to faults by the financial market supervisory authority (FINMA). “She clearly made mistakes. She was involved in this ‘to big to fail’ solution.”
>> Lire:
FINMA mulls legal action against Credit Suisse management
On the other hand, he cleared former Finance Minister Ueli Maurer, who had nevertheless declared last December in an interview that all was well at Credit Suisse and that the bank should be left to work. Christoph Blocher believes, about Ueli Maurer, that “one cannot run a bank while being a federal councilor”.
The Zurich resident nevertheless thinks that the Federal Council “could have acted” more quickly. “In Parliament, we had raised the possibility of a splitting of the banks because they were too big. The Council of States, in particular the PLR and the Centre, had buried it”, he recalls.
UBS “far too big for Switzerland”
With the takeover of Credit Suisse, UBS reached a size that made Christoph Blocher say that the country’s leading bank “is far too big for Switzerland”.
“UBS is a well-run bank, but it already went bankrupt in 2008 (…) This may be the only option at the moment to allow the situation to improve in order to avoid that we are dragging the entire Swiss economy into the loss, but we will have to react. I hope that the cartel authorities will proceed with the division, “said the former director of the EMS-Chemie company.
And Christoph Blocher concludes: “Banks must not grow to such an extent, so that when there is a failure, it drags a whole country in its wake. (…) It is a mistake of the policy of not allowing these entities to go under. Then you have to pay the piper for mistakes made in the United States.”
>> See the portrait of Christoph Blocher in the 7:30 p.m.:
Interview by Jennifer Covo
Web adaptation: Jérémie Favre