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Bank boss Rickenbacher: “Deep regret”
Photo: Arnd Wiegmann / REUTERS
The Swiss bank Julius Baer fires CEO Philipp Rickenbacher. Until a permanent successor is found, his deputy Nic Dreckmann will take over the helm, the institute announced on Thursday. The bank is making a value adjustment on loans to an unnamed group of companies with a volume of 586 million francs. According to insiders, this is Signa. The impairment led to a 52 percent decline in profits for the Zurich financial institution to 454 million francs for 2023. Analysts had expected a profit of a good 800 million francs.
"On behalf of the entire Board of Directors, I express my deep regret that the complete write-down of the largest exposure in our private debt business has significantly impacted our consolidated profit for 2023," explained Board Chairman Romeo Lacher. In the future, the bank wants to concentrate on lending in more traditional areas.
In November, Bär announced impairments of 70 million francs on its loan portfolio. A short time later, analysts assumed that this would not be enough. The Zurich Cantonal Bank, for example, estimated the loss at 400 million francs. With such loans it is often not possible to have recourse to real assets. However, a complete write-off was not expected.
The Swiss financial institution is one of the largest lenders to the Tyrolean investor René Benko's real estate group. Signa is the most prominent victim of the real estate crisis in Europe so far. Last week it became known that Signa Holding was returning ownership of the restructuring process and that the restructuring manager was taking over the helm.
Despite the negative headlines surrounding the business relationship with Signa, many customers apparently remained loyal to the bank. For the year as a whole, the bank collected a total of 12.5 billion francs in fresh money. Net new money thus reached 2.9 percent of the portfolio. At the end of the year, Bär managed 427 billion francs. According to previous information, Bär also benefited from the demise of Credit Suisse.
mik/Reuters