The 9,000 staff working for Swiss bank UBS in London are bracing themselves for further job cuts as the organisation becomes the biggest credit crunch victim to date.
Reported by The Times newspaper, the bank has disclosed big new losses from US sub-prime mortgages and structured credit. The first victim is the bank’s chairman, Marcel Ospel, who said he was quitting as he revealed losses had more than doubled to $37 billion (£18.6 billion), a figure that is equivalent to three times the annual wages bill of UBS’s 80,000 staff worldwide, and much larger than the next most exposed banks so far.
Marcel Rohner, UBS’s chief executive, said job cuts in investment banking were planned and the extent of the cuts and other measures would be announced in the next few weeks. According to the newspaper, the investment banking division, which accounts for most London jobs, would be repositioned “according to its strengths”. He declined to comment on suggestions that the job cuts would be deeper than the 1,500 announced last October.
He said: “Clearly the industry is in a very difficult environment and we have to review the capacity with which we operate in this environment.”
