2023-08-27 05:36:09
Former Federal Councilor Ueli Maurer, recently with a beard, yesterday at the start of the SVP elections in the Swiss Life Arena in Zurich.
Photo: Michael Buholzer, Keystone
Next Thursday we will experience in Switzerland what has not happened for a long time. There will be thousands of layoffs at the former major bank Credit Suisse. Nevertheless, yesterday the SVP celebrated its former Federal Councilor Ueli Maurer, who swore his party friends to the election campaign in Zurich’s Swiss Life Arena. Maurer spoke of many things, just not his biggest failure in office: the fact that he, together with the National Bank and the financial market supervisory authority (Finma), stood by and watched as the second largest Swiss bank drove a misguided manager guild into the abyss through mismanagement and excessive self-enrichment. Last year, management approved salaries and severance payments of no less than 60 million francs – fixed. In previous years, there were sometimes many more.
Tempi passati? Hardly, because firstly not a single measure has been taken to ensure that such a process does not happen again in the future. Second, politicians in Bern decided with rare unanimity to ban the embarrassing issue of Credit Suisse from the election campaign. The left doesn’t have much to gain because bankers will never vote red-green. The right has no interest either, because the FDP is perceived as a banking party anyway and because the SVP is also involved this time, since Maurer was the responsible finance minister. So they agreed on a parliamentary commission of inquiry (PUK) and, as a precautionary measure, muzzled all members until the first reliable results would be available in a year, at a reasonable distance from the elections.
The fact that the topic is now being hushed up is not only problematic because it means that those who caused the debacle are losing focus. And in addition to the managers, these are the Minister of Finance Ueli Maurer and the heads of the National Bank and Finma. In the case of the latter, those responsible are still in office, and if Switzerland wants to avoid having to save a major bank again in a few years, then it needs to strengthen the institutions and probably also change personnel in banking supervision. There also needs to be a debate about who has turned Finma into a toothless tiger in recent years. These are the two bourgeois parties SVP and FDP, partly with the help of the center and the green liberals. The only laudable exception is Christoph Blocher, who always warned against the risky foreign commitments of the big banks.
For the future, it is a matter of ensuring who is actually going to run the only remaining major Swiss bank. Unfortunately, this is not a private matter, as it should be, but a political issue. Switzerland cannot afford the collapse of a bank that manages customer assets of CHF 5,000 billion and employs more than 120,000 people. The much smaller CS, which was still managing 1250 billion in the spring, needed the unbelievable sum of 250 billion francs in liquidity and guarantees after the bank run in autumn 2022 and spring 2023 so that it did not go under. In a similar situation, the merged big bank would probably need more than 1,000 billion francs. Nobody knows how this is supposed to work. Yesterday, the SVP preferred to let pop singer Florian Ast perform and encouraged the more than 4000 attendees to cheer along to his songs.
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– Ueli Maurer evades responsibility
Seven years in office and not a word about his devastating balance sheet: the only conspicuous feature of the former finance minister is his silence.