Four former top UBS executives have denied all knowledge of Libor manipulation during their tenures, insisting they had not realised their bank’s rate-setting mechanism was under scrutiny until reading about it in newspapers years after they had left the institution.
Despite having highlighted “structured Libor” in a December 2007 investor presentation as one of UBS’s most lucrative businesses, former chief executive Marcel Rohner (above) said he had never looked into the bank’s Libor trading.
“I was fighting for survival,” Mr Rohner, who headed the bank from 2007 to 2009, told a UK parliamentary commission. “We had three capital raisings in 10 months and eight profit warnings.”
UBS paid $1.5 billion to UK, US and Swiss regulators for manipulating both the London Interbank Offered Rate and Euribor from 2005 and 2010. Barclays has also paid more than $450 million in penalties.
Mr Rohner and three former heads of investment banking at UBS also insisted that they did not recall media articles in 2007 and 2008 calling into question UBS’s Libor submissions. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013
