ZURICH, March 25 (Reuters) – Switzerland’s finance minister defended the shotgun merger between the nation’s two largest banks in an interview with Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung on Saturday, saying the usage of emergency regulation was essential to stabilise the state of affairs.
“Credit score Suisse wouldn’t have survived Monday,” Karin Keller-Sutter stated, explaining the necessity to discover a swift resolution for Credit score Suisse’s woes.
“With out a resolution, cost transactions with CS in Switzerland would have been considerably disrupted, probably even collapsed, and wages and payments may now not have been paid,” she stated.
Final Sunday it was introduced that UBS (UBSG.S) had agreed to purchase its rival Credit score Suisse (CSGN.S) for 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.23 billion) in inventory and agreed to imagine as much as 5 billion francs ($5.4 billion) in losses in a merger engineered by Swiss authorities to forestall extra market turmoil in international banking.
Emergency regulation was used to allow the banks to succeed in a speedy settlement. Shareholders, for instance, who would usually get a say in such a takeover had been largely bypassed, which has angered a few of them.
Keller-Sutter stated the Swiss authorities’s government Federal Council “solely went so far as was completely needed to attain the aim of stabilisation”.
“If we had finished nothing, CS shares would have been nugatory on Monday and the shareholders would have gone house empty-handed,” she stated.
($1 = 0.9199 Swiss francs)
Reporting by Noele Illien
Modifying by Giles Elgood
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