HSBC TO ADVICE ARAMCO ON RECORD-BREAKING USD100BN IPO. . +++ HSBC has been officially mandated as an adviser of what will be the world’s largest initial public offering (IPO) ever. In a statement, HSBC Holdings said it has formally been mandated as an adviser on the USD100bn IPO of Saudi Arabia’s national oil giant Aramco, joining Europe’s biggest banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co and Morgan Stanley, on the deal. The bank’s appointment as adviser was announced by HSBC chief executive officer Stuart Gulliver at a shareholders’ meeting in Hong Kong. The announcement officially confirms earlier reports that HSBC was close to being mandated on the hottest investment banking ticket in the world. Hong Kong remains in the running for the listing, but it is facing competition from Tokyo, Singapore, and London. If the standard 3% banking fee is applied, HSBC could receive a payout of USD3bn for the deal.

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Credit Suisse agrees to $5.3 billion mortgage settlement with US . ......Credit Suisse has agreed in principle to pay US authorities $2.48 billion (CHF2.54 billion) to settle claims it misled investors in residential mortgage-backed securities it sold in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, the Swiss bank announced on Friday. Credit Suisse said it would also provide $2.8 billion in consumer relief over five years from the settlement, it said in a statement, adding the deal was subject to negotiation of final documentation and approval by its board of directors. "Credit Suisse will take a pre-tax charge of approximately $2 billion in addition to its existing reserves against these matters. This will be taken in our 4Q 2016 financial results," it added. A report by Morgan Stanley Research said the 'removal of uncertainty was positive' but the fine was larger than expected so it will eat into Credit Suisse's capital buffer against risk. It was also reported on Friday that Deutsche Bank had agreed to a $7.2 billion settlement with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) over its sale and pooling of toxic mortgage securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Deutsche Bank had originally been asked to pay $14 billion. "I think the fines are reasonable and represent a positive for the system," Alberto Gallo, head of global macro strategies at hedge fund Algebris Investments, told Reuters. The DOJ on Thursday also sued Barclays Plc on charges of fraud in the sale of mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the 2008-09 financial crisis. The Justice Department is still pursuing mortgage allegations against other lenders in addition to Barclays. Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, Wells Fargo & Co, UBS Group AG and HSBC are also under investigation, according to company disclosures. American banks have paid tens of billions of dollars over the past three years to settle with US authorities over misleading investors about the quality of mortgages underlying securities. In 2013, JPMorgan Chase & Co agreed to pay $13 billion. The following year, Bank of America Corp agreed to pay $16.65 billion, while Citigroup cut a deal for $7 billion. In February this year, Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $2.6 billion, and in April, Goldman Sachs Group Inc negotiated a $5 billion deal.

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Government rejects demands to reform central bank . ....The government has rejected a number of proposals to reform Switzerland’s central bank. By doing so, it backed the Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) independence and its recent performance despite the failed strategy of pegging the franc to the euro. The SNB has been no stranger to political criticism in its efforts to keep the franc from appreciating too quickly against other currencies. Its policy of amassing foreign currency reserves and introducing negative interest rates has courted some controversy, not least in parliament. The abandonment of the CHF1.20 peg to the euro in January 2015 saw the franc appreciate further against the euro at the expense of exporters and the Swiss tourism industry. This sparked a raft of parliamentary proposals to force the SNB to change course. On Wednesday, cabinet rejected six such proposals, including the formation of a sovereign wealth fund, forcing a change in the SNB’s investment strategy and increasing the size of the central bank’s executive board. A government report concluded that “the SNB's monetary policy concept has proved its worth also in difficult situations”. “The Federal Council considers the SNB's existing legal basis to be appropriate and sees no need to change it,” the cabinet stated. Political football It also rejected an idea to increase state debt to take advantage of negative interest rates. The SNB has always fiercely defended its independence from political interference. This did not prevent the forced resignation of former chairman Philipp Hildebrand in 2012, but it has been able to pursue its sometimes controversial monetary policy strategy largely unhindered. In November 2014, voters rejected an initiative seeking to force the SNB to keep a minimum amount of gold on its balance sheet. Another threatened initiative, which has yet to see the light of day, would compel the SNB to underwrite household and business bank deposits and distribute the money it prints directly to citizens. The government’s rejection of the six parliamentary proposals on Wednesday has dented efforts from some sections of parliament to also influence future monetary policy strategy. In April, the SNB strongly rejected all these proposals, saying they would turn the central bank into a “political football”.

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Swiss bank to appeal in Cahuzac affair . ......Swiss private bank Reyl has decided to appeal the decision of a Paris court to fine it €1.875 million (CHF2.03 million) for helping former French Budget Minister Jerôme Cahuzac hide undeclared funds. The court handed down its decision to the Geneva-based bank on December 8 during the Cahuzac’s trial. The former minister has been sentenced to a three-year jail term. The deadline for launching an appeal was Monday evening. A second trial could take place by 2018. The information, revealed on Tuesday by the Geneva-based Le Temps newspaper, was confirmed to the AWP financial news agency. In 2013, Cahuzac, once the rising star of the French Socialist Party, was outed by a former Reyl employee turned whistleblower, who was later arrested in Switzerland under charges of breaking banking secrecy laws. Cahuzac initially denied the allegations but resigned after later admitting to holding €600,000 in a secret Swiss account and being caught in a “spiral of lies”. Cahuzac’s wife and co-defendant was also sentenced to two years in prison. Geneva-based Reyl bank was found guilty of “being an instrument for the concealment of assets” by the French court and received the maximum fine possible for money laundering. However, the bank escaped a ban on operating on French soil as demanded by the prosecution. Besides the bank, chief executive officer François Reyl was also fined €375,000 and given a two-year suspended sentence.

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Switzerland: a pirate’s paradise? . .....Swiss laws on downloading copyrighted material are relatively lenient compared with those in many other countries. As a result, Switzerland has been placed on a United States blacklist. However, legal changes are afoot. When I buy bread in a supermarket, I have to pay for it at the till. If the baker, who has worked all night, doesn’t make a profit, he or she will probably look for another job. The same goes for “immaterial goods” such as films and music. “To guarantee that there are new films and new authors, there needs to be revenue. State funding, for example, is not enough,” explains Dieter Meier, director of Suisseimage, the Swiss Authors’ Rights Cooperative for Audiovisual Works. The organisation guarantees that artists receive fair payment thanks to the distribution of their creative output. In the internet era, however, protecting intellectual property (IP) has become a headache for authorities all around the world. Websites hosted in Switzerland are said to be part of the problem (Keystone) ONLINE LAXITY US puts Switzerland on copyright watch list By Jo Fahy and Veronica DeVore The United States has put Switzerland on a watch list of countries that it says aren’t doing enough to protect intellectual property ... comment1 BUSINESS Law and order The war against online piracy and file-sharing sites, in which copyrighted works are made available by those who don’t have the right to do so, is a no-holds-barred struggle. One of the latest examples involves the “seizure” in Italy of more than 152 streaming sites, a sign of the crackdown in Rome on online piracy. Also, the closure in July of KickassTorrents, one of the largest “peer to peer” sharing sites, and the indictment of its alleged owner by the US justice authorities caused an online earthquake. Blacklist Each country approaches this phenomenon in a different way, aware that stemming it is not made any easier by its global nature. The US, where television and film exports generate $16 billion (CHF16.2 billion) a year, takes a particularly hard line. Indeed, it was Washington that in April placed Switzerland on a blacklist of countries where protection of intellectual copyright is considered insufficient. “While Switzerland is generally a strong partner on IP issues, copyright holders have essentially been prevented from enforcing their rights against online infringers and Switzerland has become an increasingly popular host country for infringing websites,” the US authorities wrote in the report. Meier at Suisseimage points out that the media and film industry is really strong in the US and it’s not the first time they’ve exerted pressure on Switzerland. “They want downloading from an illegal site to be considered illegal too. But in 2008, Swiss lawmakers clearly stated the opposite,” he said. In Switzerland you enter illegal territory if, without the necessary rights, you make a file that is protected by copyright available to someone outside your own restricted circle of acquaintances. This legal situation is much more lenient than in most European countries. The law in Italy, for example, calls for a fine of €152 (CHF164) for anyone watching a streamed football match or film on an illegal site. Peer-to-peer However, using most peer-to-peer files, such as BitTorrent, is also illegal in Switzerland because generally when one downloads a file, one shares it at the same time. That said, a ruling handed down by the Supreme Court in 2010 decreed that the protection of the consumer’s private sphere is more important than the rights on an author. “Monitoring by the authorities of peer-to-peer internet users is illegal,” said Gianni Cattaneo, who teaches internet law – with a focus on IP, privacy and e-commerce – at the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland. He adds that in each case, “the attorney general can’t act without a request for intervention by the holder of the violated copyright. It’s not easy identifying offenders who operate through peer-to-peer networks and finding (electronic) proof of violation of rights”. According to SAFE, the Swiss anti-piracy association, this legal situation “has in effect blocked the prosecution of people who violate copyright. Switzerland – unlike many industrialised countries – still doesn’t have the efficient means to impede this phenomenon”. Remedies are, however, being worked out. Why do young people download from illegal sources? The data are based on a study of thousands of Europeans aged 15-24. The values indicate the percentage of respondents who chose that answer. Take down, stay down’ In 2012, Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga mandated a working group called AGUR12 to assess a change to the federal copyright law from a technological and digital development point of view. Suisseimage director Meier is part of AGUR12 but he plays down the responsibility of internet users. “We don’t want to chase the small consumers but rather the larger companies – the ones that do the real damage,” he said. “They’re the ones who make money thanks to adverts and selling users’ data. We want to stop illegal sources. By eliminating them, illegal downloading wouldn’t exist.” The aim is to work out a law which will enable the authorities to force content providers (responsible for the contents of a website) to eliminate illegal content and to do so in a way that the content won’t immediately reappear – the “take down, stay down” approach. Swiss access providers (who supply the internet service) could, on the other hand, be called upon to block foreign pirated content and – in the case of a serious violation of copyright – to identify and provide the names of those involved as part of civil legal proceedings. But this would only happen after the user has been warned twice. It is a system that corresponds to the will of the Swiss government, avoiding criminalisation of the consumer. The providers, however, are rather reticent, according to Meier, because it would be up to them to hand out warnings or to check if something is legit or not. Will changes be enough? The parliamentary bill will be tightly linked to the conclusions of the working group, expected in February. The Swiss parliament, on the other hand, will not comment until 2018. If the amendment enters into force, it remains to be seen whether it will be enough to get Switzerland removed from the US blacklist. Lawyer Cattaneo believes the planned legal developments will definitely combat online piracy as defined in Switzerland more effectively. “If the United States thinks streaming or downloading from unauthorised sources in private is outside the law, there’s no way the issue will be resolved,” he said.

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Swiss push to unfreeze Egyptian assets . ---Switzerland and Egypt have held talks on how to move forward in the restitution of assets frozen in Swiss banks since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Around CHF180 million has been unblocked since 2011. Attorney General Michael Lauber met with his Egyptian counterpart in Cairo on Saturday to examine the latest developments in ongoing criminal proceedings. Switzerland was the first country to freeze funds related to the Mubarak clan and his entourage when the former president stood down. Six people are currently being investigated by the Swiss authorities for money laundering or supporting a criminal organisation. Switzerland has frozen CHF430 million ($418 million) in related assets. Thirteen people were under suspicion from the start. The assets are set to remain frozen until February 2017, when the government will review whether to extend the freeze. In July 2015 the attorney general dropped criminal proceedings against several people in Switzerland and ordered the unblocking of frozen assets amounting to CHF180 million. This, a result of the “reconciliation of decisions taken in Switzerland and Egypt”, according to the attorney general office’s statement on Saturday. “The main challenges for the Swiss criminal proceedings remain the large amount of frozen assets and respecting the requirement to act promptly so that parties’ rights are not infringed. The latter is important primarily because the Arab Republic of Egypt has the status of a private claimant in the Swiss proceedings,” said the statement. Ever since the Marcos (Philippines) affair in 1986, the list of illicit potentate funds that have been seized in Swiss banks and later returned to the country has steadily grown to include Montesinos (Peru), Mobutu (former Zaire), Dos Santos (Angola), Abacha (Nigeria), Kazakhstan, Salinas (Mexico), Duvalier (Haiti), Ben Ali (Tunisia), and Mubarak (Egypt).

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UBS accused over cross-border ‘tax fraud money laundering’ . .....French prosecutors have accused UBS France, its Swiss headquarters and French and Swiss bankers of orchestrating a vast cross-border system of “tax fraud money laundering”, according to a 126-page prosecution summary seen by the Swiss newspaper Le Temps. The prosecution case, handed in by the French National Financial Prosecutor on June 24, accuses UBS of “illicit financial and banking sales practices” and “aggravated laundering of tax fraud”, the French-speaking paper said on Tuesday on its front page. French judicial authorities’ have been investigating UBS since April 12, 2012 on suspicion of helping its wealthy clients avoid tax. It is alleged the bank illegally sold products designed to avoid French taxes. The bank was put under formal investigation for alleged complicity in suspected illegal sales practices in 2013. In the allegations seen by the newspaper, the National Financial Prosecutor asks for UBS France, UBS Switzerland and six former bankers – three in France and three in Switzerland – to face trial. Investigative judges must now rule on whether a trial will go ahead – possibly spring 2017, according to Le Temps - or the case be cancelled. ‘Hunters’, pseudonyms and golf France opened a probe into UBS after former employees blew the whistle over the bank's alleged system of setting up dual accounts to hide the movement of capital into Switzerland between 2004 and 2012. On the basis of numerous witness interviews, the prosecutors claim that “a systematic” and “large-scale” system was set up to launder money hidden by French tax-payers from the tax authorities. The prosecutors accuse UBS Switzerland of carrying out illegal sales practices in Paris, Lille, Bordeaux and Strasbourg. With or without the help of French colleagues, Swiss client advisers, who didn’t have the necessary authorisation, used business cards without logos and organised meetings in hotels to convince rich French residents to place their assets in Switzerland, whether the assets were declared or undeclared, the newspaper wrote citing the allegations. The bank’s employees also allegedly approached French clients, from wealthy businessmen to sports stars, during receptions, golf tournaments or concerts, to convince them to hide their money in Switzerland. Client consultants were referred to as “hunters” and wealth managers as “farmers”, with clients given pseudonyms like “friend of the Ritz”, Le Temps wrote. UBS is accused of using a double accounting method to hide the movement of illicit funds between the two countries. The prosecutor’s office claims it has collected sufficient proof to show “the existence not only of synergies between UBS AG (Switzerland) and its French branch, but also a system of cross-border cooperation which bears witness to the setting up of a systematic policy of collecting assets from French tax paying residents and bringing them to Switzerland”. UBS denies the accusations, arguing that its involvement in such financial operations has not been proven. It has previously criticised the investigation for being “highly politicised”. French judges evaluate the assets of French clients held by the Swiss bank at nearly €13 billion ($13.5 billion), of which 80% were undeclared, the paper said. Le Temps says that UBS claims these figures are not credible. The bank was forced to pay a €1.1 billion ($1.07 billion) bond to cover potential fines in 2014 when formal investigations began. UBS continues to fight against the “excessive” bail requiremen

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UBS makes better profit than expected . - - - - Switzerland's biggest bank UBS beat expectations on Friday with a second quarter net profit of CHF1.03 billion ($1.1 billion), higher than the CHF680 million forecast by analysts. "We achieved this strong result by helping our clients navigate continued difficult market conditions, while staying disciplined on risk and further reducing cost," Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti said in a statement. UBS, which has refocused its business more towards wealth management and away from investment banking since the financial crisis, said it had achieved CHF1.4 billion of its end-2017 cost savings target of CHF2.1 billion. “UBS is taking responsible measures to save costs across the firm in light of the current challenging environment,” it said. In terms of outlook, the bank said market volatility, macroeconomic uncertainty and "heightened geopolitical tensions" made worse by Britain's vote to leave the European Union had dampened clients' appetite for risk and lowered transaction volumes. It added that tough market conditions were "unlikely to change in the foreseeable future" but that it was well placed to benefit "from even a moderate improvement in conditions". The bank's profits were down from CHF1.2 billion in the same period in 2015, when market conditions were much more favourable. UBS's Swiss rival Credit Suisse reported a surprise profit of for the second quarter of 2016 on Thursday. It posted CHF170 million ($172.5 million), down sharply with CHF1.05 billion in the same period of 2015. Analysts had been expecting a loss.

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UBS and Credit Suisse – reasons to be cheerful . Life appears to be getting brighter for UBS and Credit Suisse, both based in Zurich's Paradeplatz (Keystone) Life appears to be getting brighter for UBS and Credit Suisse, both based in Zurich's Paradeplatz Switzerland’s two largest banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, have both reported drops in net profit for the second quarter. However, both banks have reasons to be relatively happy. On Friday, UBS reported a 14% drop in net profit, citing “pronounced low client activity” amid economic and geopolitical uncertainties and other market weaknesses. Nevertheless, the profit of CHF1.03 billion ($1.05 billion) was better than expected, topping average analysts’ estimates - as polled by Reuters - of CHF495 million. The bank said market volatility, macroeconomic uncertainty and “heightened geopolitical tensions” made worse by Britain’s vote on June 23 to leave the European Union dampened clients’ appetite for risk and lowered transaction volumes. It said such conditions were unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. The UBS results came a day after rival Credit Suisse unexpectedly returned to profit, with all operating units contributing to its first positive result since CEO Tidjane Thiam set out to reinvent the bank. Second-quarter net income fell 84% to CHF170 million, compared with CHF1.05 billion a year earlier. Analysts were expecting a loss of CHF178 million, according to the average of five estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

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Swiss banks tipped to retain stability... . The Swiss banking sector is strong enough to withstand negative interest rates, the strong franc, the heating housing market and volatile market conditions, according to ratings agency Moody’s. Swiss banks were given a clean bill of health by Moody’s despite concerns over the performance of some banks, particularly Credit Suisse that has seen its stock price plummet this year. Switzerland’s second largest bank has been forced to defend itself against suspicions that it is not well capitalized enough to withstand shocks. "Swiss banks continue to have very low problem loan ratios and sound capital buffers, as well as limited reliance on confidence-sensitive capital market funding and adequate loss absorption capacity," stated Michael Rohr, a Senior Credit Officer at Moody's. The ratings agency believes the Swiss economy will grow by 1.4% this year, rising to 1.7% in 2017 with unemployment to remain low and stable. Mortgage mountain Researchers at Moody’s declared themselves satisfied that Switzerland’s booming mortgage loan industry will not contain any nasty shocks. With interest rates at rock bottom and other investment classes performing badly, many investors have been putting their money into bricks and mortar. This has resulted in fears of a housing market bubble and defaults should interest rates rise too swiftly. However, Moody’s said that measures put into place by the Swiss National Bank to prevent lending from spiraling out of control should contain the situation. Swiss banks are also well positioned to ride out the prolonged period of low interest rates and the strong franc, the report concluded. The only unknown variable blotting the horizon is how Switzerland will implement a referendum to curb immigration. This may lead to clashes with the European Union and result in decreased economic growth. “Nevertheless, Moody's base-case scenario is that a continued benign macroeconomic environment in Switzerland will support the banks' asset quality, with loan-loss charges and problem loans staying low over the outlook horizon [the next 12-18 months],” the report said.