Pressure mounts for Swiss central banker to quit

SWITZERLAND’S biggest political party on Friday piled fresh pressure on the embattled head of the country’s central bank to quit over a currency trade scandal.

Swiss media said Philipp Hildebrand had failed to defuse the crisis when he pledged at a news conference on Thursday to fight accusations of wrongdoing over the controversial trade by his wife Kashya and refused to step down.

She spent Sf400 000 (R3.4 million) to buy dollars last August, just three weeks before the Swiss National Bank imposed a cap on the soaring Swiss currency.

Philipp Hildebrand, a former hedge fund executive, said last week that he had learned of the trade the following day.

The Swiss People’s Party (SVP), a vocal critic of Hildebrand and the central bank’s intervention in foreign exchange markets under his charge, called on Friday for a special parliamentary session to examine the case.

“It is unlawful and completely untenable that leaders of the Swiss National Bank carry out currency actions also in their private affairs. Philipp Hildebrand is no longer acceptable as chairman of the Swiss National Bank,” the SVP said.

In practice it would be hard for the SVP to get a special session as they would need to secure a majority in the lower and upper houses.

Other political parties appeared satisfied with Hildebrand’s performance and his promise to improve transparency at the central bank.

The government has also backed Hildebrand, who has been under intense pressure since a Bank Sarasin employee leaked bank account details of him and his wife, showing the family bought foreign currency very close to the time the central bank capped the franc.

Switzerland guards bank client confidentiality jealously and the worker has been fired.

Bank Sarasin said that the former information technology employee had worked alone and that it had filed a charge with the Zurich public prosecutor’s office against him for violating bank client confidentiality and commercial secrecy.

The bank has also filed charges against third parties for inducing those actions but did not specify who the third parties were.

Swiss media said Hildebrand had not ended the crisis with his Thursday appearance.

“It is simply hard to understand that in the middle of the biggest currency crisis for decades, the president of the Swiss National Bank would have no idea whether his wife was speculating on currency markets,” Swiss newspaper St Galler Tagblatt wrote in an editorial. – Reuters