UBS Said To Be Considering Unit Sale

Reuters reports that UBS is said to be considering the sale of its US wealth management unit Paine Webber. The move comes at a time when Swiss regulators are thought to be looking for Swiss firms, including UBS, to beef up their capital ratios. A sale of the unit, in the wake of some $37bn in asset writedowns taken by the bank in the last year, will no doubt raise a significant amount of cash.

The news agency quotes one unnamed source who said: ''If you are going to be a global wealth manager, then the US is a market where you have to be present. But it is also the case that you have to make it more profitable'. Another mentioned that Paine Webber is 'one of the assets that would be of serious interest to other people....If you were to merge Paine Webber with another brokerage, for example, there would be huge cost synergies'. UBS chairman Peter Kurer said in the bank's staff magazine earlier this month that UBS would need to 'take another long, hard look at our strategy' as 'we have to expect that the regulatory authorities will put new requirements and regulations in place'.

UBS's wealth management business is also mired in that tax evasion scandal in the US. Bradley Birkenfeld, a former UBS employee who has already pleaded guilty to tax fraud, is helping investigators build a case against the bank. He claims that the bank helped clients conceal assets to avoid paying US taxes. The Guardian reports that a Credit Suisse analyst mused last week that UBS could even lose its banking licence in the US if Birkenfeld's claims are found to be correct.

Finally, Bloomberg reports that UBS is also bogged down in Massachusetts, as the Commonwealth is suing in an attempt to get the bank to take back some $190m of auction-rate bonds it sold to state investors, claiming that the risks where not adequately explained and that investors were misled. It now appears that UBS executives started thinking about pulling out of the auction-rate bond market as early as September, yet sales staff continued to push the sale of products to investors for 5 more months.

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