Ubs

The size of three football fields, it is home to 1,400 traders and staff who handle about $1 trillion worth of transactions a day. UBS officials have boasted that a Boeing 747 jet could turn around in it.


UBS building in Midtown Manhattan.

Major sponsorship deals
Team Alinghi (America's Cup)
Athletissima Lausanne (Golden League)
Weltklasse Zurich (Golden League)

Controversies
Destruction of WW2-era archives
In January 1997, Christoph Meili, a night watchman at the Union Bank of Switzerland (a predecessor bank of today's UBS), found employees destroying archives compiled by a subsidiary that had extensive dealings with Nazi Germany, in direct violation of a recent Swiss law (adopted on 13 December 1996) protecting such material.

UBS Chairman Marcel Ospel was blamed by many for ostensibly evading the request for an extension of Swissair's line of credit, and the day after the grounding, thousands of demonstrators marching in front of the Swissair headquarters carried a banner reading "Bin Ospel" (comparing him to Osama bin Laden because of the effect of his actions on airlines' business).

Securities law violations
In April 2002, Bank of America sued five people who left its asset- and mortgage-backed securities groups for UBS, alleging that the five conspired to steal trade secrets, proprietary software and clients from Bank of America. Bank of America filed a lawsuit for US$ 20 million against Shahid Quraishi, Peter Faigl, Paul Scialabba, Reggie DeVilliers, and Daniel Huang, who had previously worked for their asset-backed group based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
On 20 March 2003, UBS client HealthSouth and its founder/CEO Richard M.

trade embargo.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India alleged that UBS had played a role in the 2004 Black Monday stock market crash which followed the National Democratic Alliance government’s defeat in the general elections. The ban was later lifted on appeal, as a result of a government tribunal ruling on 9 September 2005.
In an article published in BusinessWeek on 26 February 2007, it was announced that the firm was under investigation by federal prosecutors in the United States after it was discovered that traders working for at least two unidentified hedge funds were paying a UBS employee for information on impending ratings changes on stocks. It was later announced on 1 March, that Mitchel S.Guttenberg, an executive director in the firm's equity research department, was being charged along with 13 other individuals from various firms with insider-trading fraud of more than $15 million.
In an article published by Reuters on Feb.

One part of the investigation is over the AlphaLux fund set up by UBS, which counters that the bank set up the Luxembourg-based fund at the request of investors, but that Madoff was never on UBS's list of preferred investments.

Discrimination lawsuits
In April 2005, UBS lost the high profile case Zubulake v. Also, she alleged that there were several sexist policies in place, such as entertaining clients at strip clubs, that made it difficult for women to foster business contacts with clients. An important event in the case was that UBS had not preserved relevant e-mails after the litigation hold had been in place.

Because of this, federal judge Shira Scheindlin gave the jury a final "adverse inference" instruction, in part stating, "The fact that some UBS employees failed to preserve their e-mails after being instructed to do so, and that such e-mails cannot now be produced, is sufficient circumstantial evidence from which you are permitted, but not required, to conclude that the missing evidence was unfavorable to UBS.". The jury found in favor of Zubulake on both claims and awarded $9.1 million in compensatory damages (including back pay and professional damage), and $20.2 million in punitive damages.