Government sells UBS shares with healthy profit
The Swiss government has sold its stake in the UBS bank after concluding a deal in the United States that ended a year-long tax evasion dispute.
A statement said the total sale proceeds for the 332.2 million mandatory convertible notes was SFr7.2 billion ($6.75 billion), resulting in a net profit of SFr1.2 billion.
The statement noted that the net profit represented a return of more than 30 per cent over a period of around eight months.
The government’s stake was bought at SFr16.50 per share by institutional investors who remain unnamed.
Peter Siegenthaler, director of the Swiss Federal Finance Administration, told Swiss radio on Thursday that the buyers were scattered across Europe, North America and the Middle East.
The holdings were purchased for SFr6 billion in October as part of a multibillion-franc rescue package for the financial giant that had been hit hard by the subprime mortgage crisis.
The sale effectively ends a sticky situation for the government, which had been placed in an “impossible” situation of creating public policy while holding a huge interest in one of the country’s biggest moneymakers, an economist at think tank Avenir Suisse told swissinfo.ch earlier this week.
It comes just one day after the government provided details of an out-of-court settlement between UBS and American tax authorities that requires the bank to hand over details of 4,450 US UBS accounts suspected of hiding assets. In return, Washington agreed to drop a civil case against the Swiss bank.
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