UBS appears set to have one less legacy legal case from Credit Suisse. A Geneva prosecutor is said to be closing a money laundering investigation, but the list of unresolved cases remains long.
A year after saying there were grounds to indict, Geneva's top financial crimes prosecutor Yves Bertossa is closing a money laundering investigation against the failed bank, «Bloomberg» (behind paywall) reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Expired Deadline
No timeline was given for the formal closing of the investigation but involved parties were asked to submit any objections they might have had last week.
Preparations for an indictment go back to former Geneva Credit Suisse banker Patrice Lescaudron.
Suspicion of Money Laundering
Bertossa was looking into eight transactions that were classified as money laundering that the Swiss bank failed to prevent between 2008 and 2014.
Lescaudron forged signatures and created fake portfolio statements to illegally transfer millions and conceal losses, mainly via accounts of his biggest client, Georgian billionaire Bidsina Ivanishvili.
Several Indictments
The fraud, in which Lescaudron skimmed profits for himself, went undetected for nearly a decade. In 2015, Lescaudron confessed that a series of inflated stock bets had not panned out. He later took his own life.
Lescaudron's actions led to a series of legal battles for Credit Suisse in Bermuda and Singapore, with claims running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The indictments also exposed reckless compliance practices.
Further Trouble
The Lescaudron case is one of more than half a dozen that UBS inherited from its takeover of Credit Suisse. In another case, it faces the negative publicity of a lawsuit in London over a Mozambiquean bond scandal if it does not settle the case.
UBS estimates that Credit Suisse's legal liabilities could total as much as $4 billion over 12 months.
