Geneva (EFE) There may be tensions due to the latest events surrounding the entity.
Observers expect some 2,000 shareholders, almost double the usual number in other years, to attend the meeting, at which bank Chairman Axel Lehmann and CEO Ulrich Körner appear before shareholders for the first time since the hasty purchase of the bank to save it from bankruptcy.
The sale of Credit Suisse to UBS on March 19 for 3,000 million Swiss francs (3,010 million euros), a price 60% lower than the market value that the entity had that day, reflects only part of the losses that many shareholders they must have suffered from having shares in a bank that in one year has lost 90% of its stock market value.
Several shareholders have already anticipated that they will vote against the re-election of some of the bank’s board members as punishment for their mismanagement.
This is the case of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, one of the largest in the world, which has anticipated that it will vote against the re-election of Lehmann and six other members of the board of directors.
Other important shareholders, such as the Ethos Foundation (made up of Swiss pension funds and other institutional investors) or the organization of individual investors Actares, have also anticipated that they will vote against the re-election of the most senior managers, although not against Lehmann, president since 2022.
Eliminate two votes
The agenda of the assembly has recently been modified, in light of the latest events, and two votes have been eliminated in this regard.
One of them had to decide if the managers were going to have a bonus to promote the restructuring that they designed at the end of 2022 to try to refloat the bank (a restructuring that in the end will not take place).
The other canceled vote was going to consult if the board of directors would be released from responsibilities for the problems of the entity, a symbolic procedure that the board has preferred to withdraw.
Curiously, the shareholders will vote on the distribution of dividends, for statutory reasons, despite the fact that such dividends will not exist.
The sale of Credit Suisse to UBS will not be voted on today
The sale of the bank to UBS, an operation that under normal conditions should have been submitted to a shareholder vote, will not be consulted today, since the Swiss government modified this and other legal obligations on March 19 to approve the purchase against the clock in order to avoid amplifying the global banking crisis.
Credit Suisse, a bank created in 1856 to finance the development of the Swiss railway network, has been plagued by numerous scandals in recent years, and in the last two it had millions in losses.
These were partly due to its exposure to collapsed venture firms such as US hedge fund Archegos or Anglo-Australian financial services firm Greensill.
In addition to many shareholders, other big losers from Credit Suisse’s fall were the owners of its AT1 bonds, which totaled 16,000 million francs (16,070 million euros) and were reduced to zero with the purchase.
Some of them have been placed in the hands of the multinational law firm Quinn Emanuel, based in Los Angeles (USA), before a possible dispute with the Swiss authorities or Credit Suisse, the firm announced on Monday.