Die-hard UBS investors who have stayed with the bank through thick and thin are hoping new boss Oswald Gruebel (sitting) will return the Swiss icon to its former splendour thanks to a bitter medicine of thousands of new layoffs and heavy cost cuts announced on Wednesday.
But their patience is running out.
“The only reason why we are still with UBS is because hope dies last. But if this carries on, we will not tolerate it anymore,” said Blandina Heyne, a UBS investor for seven years, as she and her husband came to attend the bank’s annual general meeting in Zurich.
Both clients and shareholders have turned their back to Switzerland’s largest bank after the crisis forced UBS to post the biggest loss in Swiss corporate history and shares plummeted to historic lows.
Shareholder anger forced former CEO Marcel Rohner to quit in February and chairman Peter Kurer (standing) was giving his last speech on Wednesday before leaving his job after just one year of what some investors say are empty promises.
“When I was little my mother used to read me one of these bedtime stories from the Grimm’s brothers and she said they were the greatest fairytales ever written,” shareholder Rudolph Weber says. “She got it wrong. It was Mr Kurer who wrote the greatest fairytale.”
