Neil Ellerbeck, a senior banker over at HSBC Investment Management, found himself in court Wednesday, accused of murdering his wife.

Ellerbeck, 46, is said to have thought that his wife of 15 years, Katherine, was having an affair, and bugged his home telephone to find out what was going on. He is then said to have discovered that his wife was considering divorce action, and Ellerbeck is thought to have feared that he would lose much of his personal fortune, and regular access to his two children if she went through with it.

Things apparently came to a head when Mrs Ellerbeck did ask for a divorce (she was seemingly seeing her son's tennis coach at the time), and the banker is said to have lost it during a row with his wife last November. Mrs Ellerbeck was found dead at her home, a post mortem revealing that she had been strangled. Mr Ellerbeck, who was arrested at the scene, denies murder.

According to The Times newspaper, prosecutor Ed Brown said that Mrs Ellerbeck's 'death came at the end of many months, perhaps years, of unhappiness within the marriage. It came at the hands of a a man who had become obsessive and deeply jealous, and a man who was being confronted with the increasing reality and likelihood of divorce, with all the consequences that he envisaged, not least for the family and his finances'.

In the meantime, The Daily Telegraph reports that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was unable to attract the best of Wall Street to a meeting he had convened in New York Wednesday to discuss the state of the financial markets and the global economy. A few UK-based banks sent along senior representatives, but their US counterparts clearly had better things to do with their time.

And while Brown was off in New York, The Guardian reports that hedge funds and their staff are increasingly going off to the Swiss town of Pfaffikon, on the shores of Lake Zurich. With personal income tax rates running at 18%, the town is already a base for Aeris Capital, Horizon, LGT Group, Man Group, Questa Capital, RMF and Westport Private Equity. The newspaper quotes one unnamed hedge fund manager who recently moved over, who said: 'I don't want to spend my life commuting through the Blackwell Tunnel, and I don't particularly appreciate paying (a high rate of) tax when I get nothing back'. Quite.

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