Controversial and massive losses hastened the demise of Credit Suisse

It is no coincidence that banking problems in the United States hastened the end Credit Suisse. When financial turmoil occurs, the market distrusts the most vulnerable banks, and the Swiss have been dragging themselves through the mud for years. So much so that in the last five years it has lost 88% of its value.

There are two factors that explain his fall from grace. He is the first a long list of controversies that it is a treasure and that they gambled away the prestige of the bank. Let’s not go any further, in 2022 he was convicted of laundering the money of a Bulgarian gang dedicated to drug trafficking. It also had to pay 238 million euros in France to avoid litigation related to tax evasion.

A year earlier, regulators in the United Kingdom and the United States sanctioned the entity with 407 million euros for its participation in a corruption and bribery scheme in Mozambique in 2013. To this amount should be added an 83 million euro fine imposed on it by the European Commission’s Competition Service for its participation in the cartel on the foreign exchange market. It was the only bank that refused to cooperate with investigations after its existence was discovered.

The figure pales in comparison to the historic sanction imposed on him in the United States in 2014 (almost 1,900 million euros) for helping thousands of that country’s citizens evade taxes, a far cry from the 115 million Brussels sought for manipulating Libor. (interbank interest rate)

The fall of the entity

To these scandals we must add a long decade of disastrous account management, exacerbated by the pandemic. In 2021, the entity closed the year with losses of up to 1,600 million euros, numbers that quintupled last year, when the hole grew with another EUR 7,400 million in losses.