UBS Court Appeal of $1.4 Billion French Bail to Be Decided Today
(Bloomberg) — UBS Group AG will find out today whether its appeal at France’s highest court of the 1.1 billion-euro ($1.4 billion) bail it posted as part of a tax evasion probe was successful.
Switzerland’s biggest lender paid the sum after losing an initial bail appeal in September. Prosecutors charged the Zurich-based bank in July with laundering proceeds of tax fraud and judges estimated that UBS helped French taxpayers hide about 9.8 billion euros. The decision on the appeal will be made today, the court said.
The bail is unconstitutional and should be canceled, Francois Sureau, a lawyer representing the bank, said today at the Court of Cassation in Paris. “The bail was arbitrarily calculated through extrapolations,” he said.
A court prosecutor recommended the rejection of UBS’s appeal, arguing that even though the amount of the bail is without precedent in France, it follows the rules. The amount was proportionate to UBS’s assets and the type of wrongdoing, the prosecutor said.
The Swiss bank faces a potential penalty of 4.9 billion euros, a person with knowledge of the matter has said. UBS has denounced the investigation as a “highly politicized process” that hasn’t followed “elementary facets of the rule of law.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Jeffrey Vögeli in Zurich at jvogeli@bloomberg.net; Angeline Benoit in Paris at abenoit4@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elisa Martinuzzi at emartinuzzi@bloomberg.net Frank Connelly, Steve Bailey
