Four former top UBS executives yesterday denied all knowledge of Libor manipulation during their tenures, insisting they had not realised their bank’s rate-setting mechanism was under scrutiny until reading about it in newspapers years after they had left the institution.
Despite having highlighted “structured Libor” in a December 2007 investor presentation as one of UBS’s most lucrative businesses, former chief executive Marcel Rohner said he had never looked into the bank’s Libor trading.
“I was fighting for survival,” Mr Rohner, who headed the bank from 2007 to 2009, told a UK parliamentary commission. “We had three capital raisings in 10 months and eight profit warnings.”