MADRID, 27 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The rescue of Credit Suisse through its merger with UBS was the decision with the lowest risk and greatest prospects for success, according to the defense of the Swiss Finance Minister, Karin Keller-Sutter, for whom the current banking scenario with a large systemic entity makes it necessary to review the regulation of the sector and compare it with the situation in other countries.
“We have to act; we have no other option,” says the Swiss minister in an interview with the newspaper ‘Neue Zurcher Zeitung’, where she underlines the need to guarantee that a major bank can fail without dragging an entire country into the abyss.
“We will certainly also make a comparison with other countries and analyze how strict our regulations are,” says Keller-Sutter, adding that the Government’s objective is to protect the State and taxpayers and has nothing to do with hostility towards banks. systemic importance.
In any case, the minister assures that the fall of Credit Suisse was mainly due to the failure of the board of directors, management and shareholders of the entity in a process of decline that lasted years.
In this sense, he points out that for the Federal Council things were clear and, if there was a solution with fewer risks and better prospects for success, the financial center should not become a “guinea pig” for the implementation of rules that were never implemented. They had applied to a major bank.
“We were not allowed to play Russian roulette with our national economy,” he adds.
The statements by the Swiss Finance Minister come days after the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma) raised the need for a more solid legal basis, including the power to impose fines, to deal with crises. like the one that triggered the collapse of Credit Suisse.
The Swiss regulator, which did not hesitate to describe the disappearance of one of the country’s two large global banks as “traumatic”, carried out a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the background, related supervisory activities, the acute phase of the crisis and the resulting needs for changes after what happened with Credit Suisse.
Among the conclusions of its evaluation, published in mid-December in an 84-page report with the title ‘Lessons learned from the Credit Suisse crisis’, Finma considers that the collapse of the entity was due to “the poor implementation of its areas strategic” and adds that, as a result of repeated scandals and management errors, Credit Suisse lost the trust of its clients, investors and markets.
Likewise, the regulator concludes that the Credit Suisse crisis highlights the need to have a more solid legal basis, with specific instruments to address the Senior Managers Regime, as well as the power to impose fines and set stricter rules regarding corporate governance.
